Some vegans say it's wrong to keep pets

[learieonthewildmoor]

I have been thinking about the ethics of keeping pets. (I saw on the PETA website we shouldn't use animals for entertainment. No more cute cat videos on YouTube then?) People love their pets. How can it be wrong?

Sometimes when my cat is sleeping, I think "Now is the time for me to gallop across the bed, making a graceful leap over him", like he does at 4 o'clock in the morning. However, I never do.
He comes to the door whenever I come home, and though I pretend to myself he's welcoming me back; I suspect he is really looking to see if he can escape out onto the driveway. When he does make a mad dash out onto the driveway, he then lies down purring whereupon I pick him up and carry him back in.
I keep a chair next to my computer because he likes to sit next to me. Pretty much every day he sits on my computer mouse until I get up and let him sit in my chair. Then I pick him up and put him on his chair and he goes to sleep.
When he sees me carrying a coffee cup up the stairs, he runs ahead of me and jumps out at my ankles. Only when I'm carrying a coffee cup.
He has a dozen toys but much prefers to bring in leaves and gum nuts which he then puts in my shoes for safe keeping.
He won't eat raw meat so we buy a super expensive dry cat food for his teeth and gums. He hates tablets so we buy the super expensive worm and flea liquid treatment.
I send photos of him to my husband when he is at work. There one million photos of the cat sleeping on our iCloud.

We got him as a rescue kitten and I can't help feeling he's having a better life with us; rather than as a feral animal full of worms and fleas with no safe territory, or euthanised. We get the pleasure of living with him, he gets a good life - it seems like a perfectly ethical arrangement.
I wonder if vegans are being a bit too self-denying and overly rigorous?

Another day I want to talk about the vegan attitude to cheese.

Why would you care what a vegan thinks?
If I want a pet and can treat it well, give it love and a good home, then I’ll have one.

Leave them to it, if they think it’s cruel , you won’t change their minds.

I believe they want domesticated animals to die out naturally i.e no more breeding.

learieonthewildmoor keeping meat eating pets is morally inconsistent with ethical veganism IMO. Some vegans are vegan because they believe it's healthy on an individual level, and in that case pets are irrelevant.

Tbh I only know one ethical vegan who's rational seemed consistent and persuasive, and she is vegan for environmental reasons, and tries to have the smallest environmental impact she can. Keeping meat eating pets or large pets like horses increases your negative impact on the environment hugely, as of course does having children. Even a rabbit increases your impact - food in plastic packaging, food miles, hutch, water bottles etc.

A pet bred as a pet is obviously unethical in terms of environmental impact, but you could easily argue that keeping rescue animals alive is too. Human as a species are responsible for back yard breeders and un-neutered cats and dogs. We created them, unlike rats and mice. Taking them in and feeding them meat and processed meat products impacts the planet and makes room for more... Obviously aeroplane travel, car ownership and conspicuous consumption of any unsustainable goods including buying more clothes than you need or heating an unnecessarily large home is also out, because what is the point in protecting the planet in one way while contributing to it's destruction in another.

If you're going to be an ethical vegan, and especially if you're going to be evangelistic about it, I think keeping pets is hypocritical. However if you're quietly vegan for health or sentimental reasons it's nobody else's business whether you compartmentalise your thinking and live happily with cognitive dissonance.

We are vegetarians (except DS) we kept guinea-pigs for years , vegetarian animals and all Rescues.

Once a Year we put them on a Christmas Fleece with a Christmas hat placed on their furry little craniums (not tied , just balanced)

In exchange for this they got the Christmas veg trimmings.

They complained about the Animal Exploitation and Cruelty but happily tucked into the sprout peelings .

I participated in Veganuary last year and got told I was cruel for not disapproving of piñatas!

Nothing unethical about keeping a cat. The are the only animal that has self-domesticated - basically they chose us. And can choose to leave.

Birds, rodents, rabbits - I can see the argument. They would all choose to leave given half a chance. I'm not sure that dogs would.

GottenGottenGotten cats are massively unethical pets - if humans didn't keep them as pets they'd be rare, but because we keep them as pets they decimate wild bird populations.

Hithere12

She fwiw. You may think that, I couldn’t possibly comment

Will only say, my mum’s an almost lifelong vegetarian (80 now) but she feeds us roast chicken when we visit because we’re not. I appreciate vegans are quite different.

Most vegans just don’t want people to breed and sell animals for thousands of pounds. They think if you want a pet, you should adopt and I completely agree.

It’s not exploitative to care for a pet, they have already been born and you are keeping them alive. I’m not sure what these particular vegans really want, cats and dogs to just be roaming free starving? All kept in a free range type shelter?

if humans didn't keep them as pets they'd be rare

Not true. If humans didn’t neuter them there’d just be thousands of stray cats.

I’ve just told the dog he is implicated in a very unethical arrangement. He yawned.

There seem to be plenty of wild birds where I live.

I refer you to the rspb

www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-for-wildlife/animal-deterrents/cats-and-garden-birds/are-cats-causing-bird-declines/

"Despite the large numbers of birds killed by cats in gardens, there is no clear scientific evidence that such mortality is causing bird populations to decline. This may be surprising, but many millions of birds die naturally every year, mainly through starvation, disease or other forms of predation. There is evidence that cats tend to take weak or sickly birds.

We also know that of the millions of baby birds hatched each year, most will die before they reach breeding age. This is also quite natural, and each pair needs only to rear two young that survive to breeding age to replace themselves and maintain the population.

It is likely that most of the birds killed by cats would have died anyway from other causes before the next breeding season, so cats are unlikely to have a major impact on populations. If their predation was additional to these other causes of mortality, this might have a serious impact on bird populations."

There is more, but I didn't want to post it all.

Read more at www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-for-wildlife/animal-deterrents/cats-and-garden-birds/are-cats-causing-bird-declines/#HmSRvKj6blpHzo4j.99

We also have a rescue cat - she has a great life with us. How anyone can say don’t rescue cats and dogs from shelters is a very odd person.
Maybe the vitriol should be reserved for those who run puppy farms.

Interesting point from a PP re medication - pls answer if you are vegan - do you check any medication you may need to see if it has been tested on animals? If it had, would you still take it?

Personally (and speaking entirely for myself and not my fellow vegans), I’m going to give you a rather non-committal ‘it depends’.

Ideally I avoid medications containing animal products where possible. So some hay fever medications contain animal-derived products for example but there are other brands available which don’t so I will always opt for those.

But I take paracetamol or ibuprofen if I have a headache - probably those were tested on animals in some point in their history? I suspect the vast majority of medications were at trial stage.

A friend asked me this the other day actually. She was recently diagnosed with a thyroid problem and her medication is derived directly from pig hormone. She asked if I’d take it if needed. It’s an interesting question. I think I’d actively search for a synthetic alternative and do my best to find an alternative treatment. Failing that I would research the potential impact of not accepting the treatment and weigh up the impact of that on my life and health. If however there were no other options and the impact of refusing treatment was to be dire then yes, I would very sadly and with much anguish accept the treatment.

I know there are vegans who believe that their life is no more important than that of any animal but in all honesty, I do value my life above that of an animal’s in a straight ‘them or me’ choice. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I think I’d actively search for a synthetic alternative

As in, via good old google, I’m not a research scientist!

They definitely would not appreciate my so called man made cat ( as a vegan friend called him) but he doesn't care as he does what he wants eats the best and comes over when he wants a fuss! I had a life time of taking in feral kittens of farm and over an average of 6 month charming then with just leaving them choose how much interaction they wanted and they were the best but the 10 yrs Marblecakes has been in our life he deserves the best as all cats deserve. How can them fending for them selves be better and what about all the mice and birds that the cats kill don't they deserve protection? Honestly madness. Anyway here's Marblecakes in his usual daytime place on the sofa.

anothernotherone I don't thik this is true that cats decimate the bird population, where's the proof? I live in the country, plenty of cats and birds here. ;-) The main problem we have is with dogs killing sheep, happens repeatedly and is horrifying.

I do think it's odd that some people don't let their cats outside but that's maybe another thread...

To people who say pets are there for our own entertainment, I think my dog does pretty well out of me. My life revolves around giving her the best life possible and making my arrangements so that she can go out enough, be fed at the right times without fail, gets to do different and interesting things and to different places all the time and is never left alone. She's always happy, never hungry (except if she fancies what I'm eating), never bored, never afraid or alone. If anyone thinks that's cruel then they can get stuffed.

I once had a rescue cat that flatly refused to go outside.

We found her almost dead and badly injured, covered in fleas in a drain. Vet was in 2 minds about just putting her down when we brought her in.

I think she had a very clear concept of the difference between the life she ended up with and the one she started with.

When she first came home if we were not careful she would eat so much at once that her tummy would touch the ground and she couldn't walk.

She eventually settled and lived a longish (12 years) life but never ever went outside again unless she was in the carrier. She would sit in open windows and doors and look out.

Pretty sure that all medications are tested on animals in the UK.

To people who say pets are there for our own entertainment, I think my dog does pretty well out of me. My life revolves around giving her the best life possible and making my arrangements so that she can go out enough, be fed at the right times without fail, gets to do different and interesting things and to different places all the time and is never left alone. She's always happy, never hungry (except if she fancies what I'm eating), never bored, never afraid or alone

She doesn’t have free will in any of this though. You own her and you dictate her schedule. If she wandered off and didn’t come back to you...would you let her go?

She doesn’t have free will in any of this though. You own her and you dictate her schedule. A bit like work bosses, children, schools, trains buses etc. Life is pretty much run to smeone elses schedule.

If she wandered off and didn’t come back to you...would you let her go Not if she was over 18 and had a job and somehwere to go!

The PETA employees backed their van up to the porch and threw biscuits to Maya, who was sitting on her porch, hoping to coax her off her property and give PETA the ability to claim she was a stray dog “at large” whom they could therefore legally impound. In Virginia, PETA is licensed as an “animal shelter.” But Maya refused to stay off the property and after grabbing the biscuit, ran back to the safety of her porch. One of the employees went onto the property and stole Maya. But larceny wasn’t the only law the PETA employees would break. Virginia law requires dogs to be held for five days before they can be killed by shelters. It also requires private shelters like PETA to notify the municipal animal control shelter of any “stray” dogs they take in. PETA would do neither. Within hours, Maya was dead. PETA had killed her with a lethal dose of poison.

The dog was on her owner's property, not in a park, the park was alongside. Hence the $49,000 payout they had to make to the family.

I'd argue that my dog does have free will in it. I walk off in the park and he follows me without my calling him. I tried hiding behind a tree and he looked panicked before running back to find me.

I used to live with his old owner and he very clearly started to transfer his affection to me from his old owner.

Like all parents, I have to do some things that he wouldn't choose of his own free will - like trips to the vet - but I think he knows which side his bread is buttered and makes choices that indicate he really quite likes being near me - from never going more than about 50-100 yards from me while walking to choosing to snuggle up next to me in bed.