Let's look at pets.
So, the vegan philosophy towards pets is adopt don't shop which primarily means don't buy animals from breeders. If we buy an animal from
a breeder, we're commodifying them,
we put a price tag on them, but also breeders...it's a commodification in itself.
Okay, so breeders we would consider to be unethical because they exist purely to raise animals to sell them for money.
And so we say adopt,
because another reason we don't want people to buy is because we have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions
of animals in shelters all around the world who need a home, and
when we buy animals from breeders, we're almost sentencing these animals to be euthanized.
And what we have is somewhat of an irresponsible society, and part of the problem
I often find is that I will often say that we are a society of dog lovers and cat lovers,
and I don't know if that's strictly true because I don't know how a society of dog and cat lovers could have so many animals in shelters,
or more importantly, how many people buy these animals from breeders [and] after a few months realize
they can't look after them and then give them away
knowing they may well be put down.
That to me seems contradictory to the notion of being dog lovers yet everyone classifies themselves as a dog lover.
Anyway, that is more of a personal pet peeve than anything else. Alright, so we have all these animals in shelters
that are being euthanized,
and so if we buy from breeders, we're not rescuing an animal, a very healthy, a very behaviorally,
very adequate animal who just needs a home to go to because of the inadequacies of the raising of the owners beforehand.
So, that in itself it means that we should be adopting.
But if we're not breeding animals into existence anymore,
it becomes somewhat of a difficult problem, because obviously we're gonna
drastically reduce the number of animals that are, number of pet animals, that are raised into existence.
And then the word pet becomes quite interesting. And we say owner, don't we? I used the word owner just then, the dog's owner.
Well that notion of an owner
is somewhat interesting in itself.
One thing I didn't touch upon in the talk, but sometimes I do, is the notion of language.
And so when I say about re-evaluating our relationship with animals and their purpose on this planet,
we have to look at how we refer to them in the language that we use. I wanna think that most of us say, and
I used to say it and sometimes I still do, and I catch myself out, is we call animals "it".
Look at it. Isn't it nice? It, what's an it? An it is an inanimate object.
You look at your phone you go, ahh that it is my phone. It has no sentience, no consciousness,
but an animal is a someone. They're a being. They're alive. They're conscious. What defines us as a someone? The consciousness and sentience.
The fact that we're individuals. Well, these animals are therefore by definition
someones as well. The notion of an "it" denigrates them to property status, which is what society seeks to do.
It seeks to devalue the lives of non-human animals 'til we refer to them as property.
In the eyes of the law, they're property. In the eyes of our vocabulary,
they're property as well, and so the word pet and the word owner also plays into this because it suggests dominion,
exploitation, assertiveness, authoritarianism. And so, we look at dogs,
and this was quite traumatizing, someone said to me this once, because we were talking about dogs, and I said dogs are wonderful, they just
unconditionally love. And I said well that's interesting, but have you considered it this way?
Everything a dog does in their day is dictated by what you want them to do.
They go out to the toilet when you take them out, they're fed
when you feed them, they have water when you feed them, they go for walks when you feed them,
they go to bed when you want them to go to bed.
And so they rely on you for everything. They rely on you for all of the necessities in their life.
Don't you call it Stockholm Syndrome,
where you become reliant on your captor because everything you need to sustain your life is dependent on what they do and what they say?
And so we refer to that as unconditional love, but actually, potentially that unconditional love is just a form of
dependency, that they need to be loved by you so that you give them what they need to sustain their life. And ugh,
that's horrible isn't it? What a horrible feeling that is. I don't know if that's necessarily true.
I do believe that dogs can unconditionally love for more reasons than the fact that we dictate their entire schedule,
but at the same time, it draws upon ideas of exploitation and dominion.
And so, let's relate it back to what we were saying before about breeding, and if we stop breeding animals, there's no more shelters,
well that we only adopt from shelters, eventually there's no animals in shelters, which means that theoretically we have no more pets.
Seems quite sad really, doesn't it, because who doesn't want a dog and a cat and all these animals in their homes.
I mean, we love these animals in our homes. They are literally family members to us,
and so it seems somewhat of an uncomfortable feeling to suggest that, maybe one day,
this is the world that we live in. So, we can look at it selfishly and say, well it's not gonna happen in our lifetime,
so we don't have to worry too much, but that's a bit a selfish way of looking at it.
And so, well, is that the morally righteous thing to do? I don't know.
I don't see another solution.
If I'm against this thing,
that's the consequence of what I'm against. And so, to try and deny that this is the reality of what's going to happen would mean
that I'm somehow fulfilling in a form of commodification that I'm against, so
may seem uncomfortable, but isn't that the way that we live in our lives, right?
We gave up animal products, or I did, because I didn't want to perpetuate this system, but it was uncomfortable for me.
I mean, I didn't want to change my habits or my routines. I didn't want to stop eating bacon and halloumi.
I didn't want to do these things, but I did it because I understood that there was a more important thing at play.
That, actually, my life is not there just for me to
hedonistically and egoically just do what I want to do, and that, actually, my life has
responsibility and accountability
that should be held upon it. And so,
actually, maybe this is an extension of the idea that sometimes in life doing what's right isn't always doing what we want to do.
Maybe that's the situation. So maybe in the future there will be no pets,
but then what about all these species of animals, and this is where I start to play devil's advocate with myself, because I say, well, Labradors and
Alsatians and Chihuahuas and Pomeranians and Poodles,
they're not just out there in the wild, and so, we're almost sentencing these animals to extinction, which doesn't seem right in itself, does it?
Because we domesticate these animals to this point and then we basically control if they're around in the future?
Something I grapple with.
The notion of veganism seems somewhat kind of like a
progressive stance and a progressive step in the sense that there's always going to be these little things that we have to address going forward.
And so, I'm sure we could find some situation where we do have these animals in existence,
but they exist somewhat more harmoniously than they do now. I don't know. It's an interesting conundrum.