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Opinion: People who love animals should not own pets

October 9, 2014 Charles Danten - Special to the Montreal Gazette

The exploitation of pets is much more cruel, in its hypocrisy and sophistication, than any other form of animal exploitation, including factory farming, force-feeding of geese, and vivisection.

It is widely believed that pets make us more human, enhance our health, sense of psychological well-being and longevity. But while some researchers have reported that positive short-term effects of the placebo type accrue from interacting with animals, others have found in convincing large-scale quantitative studies that the health and happiness of pet owners is no better, and in some cases worse, than that of non pet-owners.

It is also widely believed that animals benefit as much as we do from the human-animal bond. Yet nothing is farther from the truth:

Because of the bond we impose on them, all pets by definition remain infantile, never reaching any level of autonomy or emotional maturity. The maintenance of this infantile attachment feeds a permanent state of anxiety. This translates clinically to various psychosomatic diseases such as colitis, bladder inflammation and skin problems. Psychological problems such as phobias, self-mutilation, and separation anxiety are widespread and as frequent as problems linked to domination, fear, and ambivalence. These animals will often be severely punished or abandoned by their owners who are unable to read correctly the meaning of these neuroses, which they mistake for some kind of defect in the animal’s character. Curative treatments are doomed to fail, since these diseases stem from the very concept of pet and a relationship that’s flawed from the very start.

Vaccination for commercial and financial reasons is killing thousands of animals each year. Various mutilations like declawing of cats, ear trimming, spaying, and castration to make animals more appealing and easier to control are causing untold misery to animals.

Animal health care itself is a subtle form of animal abuse. It is a case of wishful thinking to imagine that a pet can understand and appreciate whatever good intentions are behind veterinary medical care.

We cause their diseases in myriad ways on the one hand, then profit from them on the other. This absurdity suggests that our concern for pet health has much more to do with trying to meet our own needs than with anything else.

When they are in style, breeds become the object of intense breeding by various businessmen, amateurs, backyard aficionados and show breeders that rapidly leads to their deterioration. There are more than 300 incurable and debilitating genetic diseases in pets, mostly caused by inbreeding and consumerism.

Animals are afflicted with carefully planned anatomical characteristics that make nightmares of their lives. Dogs and cats belonging to brachycephalic breeds (Pug, English bulldog, Boston terrier, Pekingese, Persian, Himalayan, etc.), for example, characterized by a crushed-in skull and bulging eyes, frequently have a hard time just breathing.

The physical conditions of captivity are also taking their toll. Restricted to small spaces for their entire lives, locked up while their owners go on with their lives, the majority of pets know an existence as limited and boring as that of prisoners or slaves.

Millions of animals are destroyed each year in pounds euphemistically called shelters. Others, that will never be adopted because of unredeemable physical or psychological flaws, spend their lives cooped up in no-kill shelters at the total mercy of Good Samaritans, who are only pleasing themselves by insisting on keeping these animals alive, as a matter of principle, or for business and image reasons.

Innovations in education providing an honest look at the nature of our relationship with the animal world would be tremendously more fruitful than the lessons learned from the exploitation of a pet.

Once your pet dies of a natural death, for instance, you can choose in your own life, if you so desire, to put an end to this barbarism with a smiley face by simply walking away. If we truly loved animals, we would leave them alone.

Charles Danten is a former veterinarian who lives in Montreal.

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