via theguardian:
A growing number of people argue that owning pets is unethical – and that animals can never really have a good life in a human home
Troy Vettese has a parrot in his family. She gets paid a lot of attention, but she wants more. Parrots are clever and social. Vettese says: “She needs to be entertained all the time, otherwise she really is suffering.” He sees a possible different life for her: “She could be living with her friends and family in a forest, very happy – but she’s not, and that’s unfair to her.”
If that sounds sensible, but you don’t see what it has to do with the fluffy, well-exercised and frequently fed love of your life at home, bear with me. Of course, when it comes to owning pets, there are varying shades of grey. On one end of the spectrum: the poor snake I spotted at a party recently, being worn as a necklace. At the other might be your rescue pup, or my rescue cats, one with a damaged cerebellum and the other with one eye; they wouldn’t have survived long on the streets. But I still find myself wondering whether it is fair keeping them at all.
We may think that we are giving our companions rounded lives and putting them first when we rise early for walkies or clean up another accident. But Vettese, an environmental historian who specialises in animal studies, says the suffering of his family’s much-loved bird is evidence that pet ownership is not about the animals.
“If people really cared about animals, we would only engage in rescues and helping animal sanctuaries’ wildlife rehabilitation – things that we find fulfilling, but that also help the animal,” he says. Instead, “we only like relationships where they are easy, where the pets are well maintained, where we can hire a dog walker, where it impinges as little as possible on our life and we are extracting as much emotional support as we want from them”. To his mind, it is definitely “a very selfish relationship”.