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Whose Dog is It Anyway? Pets, Ownership, Slavery - Animal Rights, Human Rights - What's Right?
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The dog next door wants to move in. He's been hungry. He's often cold. He's left alone for days in the barn. We have two dogs, nine cats (we live in the country) - and a warm house where our pets are welcome. We'd like to give him a home. But he belongs to the farm next door.
He shows up whenever he's let loose - comes, peers in the window, then curls up in a wind-sheltered corner near our door for hours, waiting for us to relent and let him in. With us he has hope - because we've often let him in, including overnight.
It started in summer when he was just a pup. We took care of him for a couple of weeks when the people next door went away on a holiday. We offered, and his owners were glad we were there to look after him. But I think they already worried that our care would spoil him.
But that was in summer, when the kids were home from school. He had a lot to keep him with his owners.
Early in fall, he often came over, but would race home when the school bus went by.
Recently, he's stayed on our property and just watched it. It's cold out. The kids don't spend time outdoors, but he's stuck there.
Winter is coming. It's been here, with the temperature down to 17 below. It's mild again now, but won't stay that way.
Anyway, that's not the question. The question is: who should have the right to decide where the dog lives? The dog or the owners?
The question behind the question: do we have the right to own dogs and cats, or should they be allowed to make some decisions on their own - like where they want to live.
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I'm not talking about their current legal rights. Those are obvious. Parents used to have the legal right to beat their children as often as they wanted, as hard as they wanted. I don't care about legal rights - those in fact change, in a democracy, as the general values of a society change. So now children have a legal right not to be beaten, and we have a legal right to birth control, divorce, etc. - because our values have changed.
Our values are based on what we believe is truly right - not legally, but morally, ethically, inherently. What intrinsic rights, we ask ourselves, should people have, children have, animals have, based on who we are, who they are?
I don't like (too soft a word) the slaughterhouse system - it offends my sense of what is right for animals. Trucks rattle past our place - open slats on the side. There's a pig farm a couple of kilometers away - enclosed, no sight or sound of what's inside. Then one quick trip through the outdoors. And a squealing death. I don't want to be part of it.
I stopped eating land animals and birds long ago. It did not feel right to me.
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And now again, it does not feel right that the dog next door should be stuck where he doesn't want to be.
This question - should dogs and cats have some say in where they live? - may sound absurd to you.
But it used to be considered normal for people to own other people. Now it's unthinkable for many people.
I remember reading, and later teaching, The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston. There's a passage describing a traditional Chinese delicacy. A live monkey is screwed into place in a table with a hole neatly carved for the top of its skull to show above the table surface. The monkey's body presumably dangles underneath. The skull is sawed open, and the brain - apparently delicious - is eaten. At some point, the monkey dies.
I've taught the book. What stood out for you, I ask my students (college and university level). One after another, they bring up this passage and shudder.
Also interesting is that the author writes the passage - the tone is so casual - as if unaware that her description might horrify current Western sensibilities. Perhaps this did not occur to her, though she grew up in the United States - just as many North Americans are not horrified by the slaughterhouse system (but do want to make sure they don't have to face it).
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Times change, customs change. The delicacy of one time is the atrocity of another.
The dog next door isn't enduring atrocities. He'd just rather be indoors, than in an unheated barn with only cows for company. He has been skinny, but no one was intentionally starving him.
Plus, the life his owner wants for him is better than that of many city dogs - where, at present, many people are not horrified at the stultifying lives of millions of animals. City dogs - many get two short walks a day, long hours of solitude, and a minimum of attention in the evening. Many have no contact with other animals. You call that a life?
Here, I hear other dogs in the distance howling at night. They, like the dog next door, must be outdoors - or why howl? (They're far away enough that, fortunately, we only hear them when we're outdoors.)
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Recently the owner asked that we stop letting the dog into our home. In this case, he is probably outside his legal rights. The dog comes onto our property of his own free will. We've never held him captive. (It's the owner who does that.)
The dog is roaming less and less these days - increasingly locked in the barn. We are the ones learning the lesson: the dog will be punished if comes near our place. So we had better not be nice. It's not worth it in terms of the cost to the dog.
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I keep coming back to my question. What rights should animals have?
And, in the meantime, how should we deal with this specific dog? Do we turn our back on him?
There are no definite plans. My partner has been away for a few weeks. Before he left, he was unwilling to come with me and talk with the owner, though like me he cared about the dog. Now he is more willing. We know that the owner thought, when he got the puppy, that it would turn into a nice burly husky-like guard dog. It didn't. It's more like an overgrown terrier. We've thought of offering to find him a dog closer to what he intended to get. I've also thought of asking if we can buy the dog from him.
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Pets, ownership, slavery. I'm not suggesting that owning people is the same thing as owning animals. I am suggesting that we have a lot of thinking to do about what's right, when it comes to animal rights.
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Elsa - prof, writer, visual artist, thinker, performer. Love life, thinking, creating, doing, reaching. All my life, creativity has played an enormous part. The magic of story, music, songs, imagining. Also, the magic of thinking well, creatively.
PET FRIENDLY VACATION RENTALS - Provence, Montreal, Quebec countryside
For pet lovers: lots of pet-friendly vacation rental homes, welcoming to both dogs and cats:
http://www.holiday-vacation-rentals-plus.com
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"It is a fact readily acknowledged, that for humans, an idea is much more powerful than a fact." One idea: just as ideas can close our minds, they can open them to new worlds and visions.
