My wife has been making fun of the care and concern I have demonstrating for our new dog by calling me “obsessed.” Am I obsessed? To be honest, probably a little. Two weeks into caring for this particular dog, I have been surprised by how much love, care, and responsibility I feel for her. More than anything, the peculiarities of this care have led me back to big questions around human responsibility for animal welfare and sentient life in general.
In a previous post on dogs in American culture, I ended with a question: how do we extend care to sentient life and alter systems that diminish the value of said life? This question actually builds on a number of previous posts, including one on animal consciousness and suffering, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few years. Indeed, there’s also an interesting connection to be made to an earlier post about the care parents have for their own children versus the way our country provides for children in general.
The problem is the same: how can our system of government better care for both human persons and non-human persons? Legal scholars and ethicists use the term non-human person to make a legal case for particular protections for animals deserving of rights and protections on the basis of their sentience and/or intelligence. As the cognitive scientist, Alexandra Horowitz has argued in Our Dogs, Ourselves there is a “need to revise antiquated legal notions of animals” as simple property like a chair and transform the legal framework such that it enables dogs to experience the full potential of their species.
Since adopting our dog from the Center for Animal Rescue and Enrichment St. Louis (CARESTL), I have been more attuned to the seemingly vast number of pets that are being mistreated, abandoned, and uncared for in just this small geographic area of St. Louis. This no-kill shelter that doesn’t turn away animals has been overloaded with animals this July, and is constantly requesting good-hearted people to take in fosters or adopt.
We adopted rather than turning to an unregulated breeding system that is responsible for the perpetuation of the idea of dogs as opportunity for profit. I am frankly amazed by the number of progressive well-meaning people who purchase dogs from breeders, often justifying their decision by explaining that “this is a good breeder.” Even “good breeders” are producing dogs on a profit basis while simultaneously other animals are murdered and stuck in shelters where they are unwanted. I understand the desire of wanting a “perfect” dog that you can raise from a puppy that lives up to particular standards of beauty but weighed against the need for good people to adopt dogs that need homes, potential dog owners should be making the more ethical choice of adoption.
Although breeders could certainly be regulated, dog adoption is a downstream problem to an issue that requires an upstream solution. Why are there so many unwanted and mistreated animals? No doubt the notion and legal status of dogs as property is responsible for this, but the reality is that we live in a society and world that sees animal life in general as an opportunity for exploitation. From dogs to cows to turkeys, animals are instrumental to human ends, rather than human-animal relationships being an opportunity for mutual benefit.
Our worldview on animals must be fundamentally shifted if we are to develop a society that cares for life. As the anthropologist Peter Whiteley has argued on Native American peoples’ relationship with animals and nature:
If we attend more closely, we might gain a much more sustainable and mutually respectful relationship with the natural world and its many species — a genuine inter-species comity. For that to happen, we must be open to the unexpected — including the regard of eagles, the agency of rattlesnakes, and the sympathy of killer whales. And it is time to set aside nation-state prejudices and the exclusion of Native peoples from a voice in the management of environmental relations. We will all be better off if that voice is allowed genuine authority to help shape decisions affecting our world.
We must be more attuned to the moral complexity of the world around us, as well as the insights of different cultural traditions, to consider deeply the agency and rights of non-human animals and sentient life.