Pet ownership is riddled with moral problems like eugenics, family separation, animal negligence, and increased pollution. The ethics of owning pets is a complex issue and depends on many factors such as the type of animal, reasons for adoption, sourcing of the pet, and the way the animal is cared for.
Whether the animal was rescued or bred is an important part of the equation. Animal breeders treat dogs like science experiments in order to produce offspring based on size, attractiveness, attitude, and hypoallergenic coats. These animals often face early deaths in puppy mills or on the way to pet stores. Similarly, animals labeled as “exotic” are taken from their habitats and often die during transnational trips to the market. Humans breed and collect animals based on their preferences, leading to dogs such as boxers, pugs, and French bulldogs, who lead troubled lives and suffer health problems. Because of the animal cruelty in the market, adopting rescue animals from shelters is a more ethical option than purchasing eugenically bred animals in pet shops.
Apart from issues of sourcing animals, pets often don’t receive adequate attention or get enough exercise in human households. 40 percent of African grey parrots in captivity pluck their own feathers because of the boredom of cage life. These parrots are very intelligent birds who need lots of stimulation. It’s also likely that pet fish suffer from boredom in their small tanks.
Many families looked for pets during the COVID-19 lockdown in order to relieve boredom and find companionship during a time of social isolation. Shortly after returning to work, many pet owners found that they didn’t have time or energy to care for their animals, which led to an increase in dogs without homes and an overflow of animals in rescue shelters. In many homes, pets receive very conditional love based on the needs of their owners, who obsess over and humanize their pets. We make our animals fit into our lifestyles by dressing them up for our pleasure and purchasing dog walkers for our convenience. Owners prefer an easy relationship with pets that requires little compromise.
Another commonly overlooked issue is the meat consumption of pets, in both pet food and from wild animals. Though dogs can be sustained on a vegan diet, less than 2 percent of owners feed their pet dogs plant-based diets. Because of this lack of knowledge and solutions, U.S. meat consumption by pets is greater than consumption by Germany’s human population. Our animal companions would rank fifth globally if they were their own country! Fish are also commonly fed pellets with traces of meat when they could also live off of a vegan diet. Gary Okin, a UCLA Geography professor, found that U.S. cats and dogs alone are “responsible for 25–30 percent of the environmental impact of meat consumption” in the country, which amounts to around 64 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. These high levels of greenhouse gasses contribute to global warming. This data shows that pet ownership isn’t just bad for pets, but bad for the environment as well.
A complicating factor is the normalization of pet ownership in Western society, especially in U.S. culture, where 66 percent of households keep an animal. Services such as Uber Pet — which allows customers to bring their furry friends in an Uber ride — and BringFido — a search engine for pet-friendly hotels and Airbnbs — are examples of societal accommodations for pet owners, as well as corporations capitalizing off of the pet owners. The ethicality of having a pet isn’t often rejected or even questioned in the U.S. because of both custom and the success of the growing pet industry, valued at $303 billion in 2023. Because of the many historical and societal factors, I think the best solution isn’t denouncing pet ownership but re-evaluating our relationships with these animals. Some city and federal governments have taken action against the harm caused by the pet industry. New York, for example, has banned pet stores from selling cats and dogs in order to reduce collaboration with puppy mills and to encourage adoption from rescue shelters. Germany mandated hour-long walks for dogs after noticing the lack of exercise that these animals experienced in households. Laws like these show that we could be moving in the right direction culturally in animal allyship.
98 percent of households with a pet in the U.S. consider their animal “an important member of their family.” Because of this obvious care and concern we have for our pets, I believe it’s possible to collectively learn what it means to put our animals’ needs first and to redefine pet ownership. Jessica du Toit, a philosophy student at Western University in Ontario who studies animal ethics, differentiates keeping or caring for pets and owning them. Instead of objectifying pets by thinking of them as our property, she supports changing our language and attitudes towards them.
“[By shifting our perspective to] ‘caring for’ or ‘keeping’ companion animals, we are much more likely to treat our companion animals in a manner that is appropriate, given their inherent moral worth,” Du Toit said.
In practice, this means understanding and adapting to the lifestyles of our pets instead of the other way around. Let it be a house full of dog, with beds that smell like the dog, because that’s going to be comfortable for the dog — toys lying around, hair on the couch, muddy footprints” Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and the author of Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets, said.
This language and mentality helps us to build solidarity and respect toward the animals we live with — a very necessary shift to incite widespread change in the culture of pet consumerism.
