I just read this post by Vegan Practically: Where to Draw the Line , on having or not having companion animals. It's a discussion back and forth on whether keeping companion animals can be justified. In relation to this, I'm gonna lay out what I call "the animal rights trilemma" for pet reproduction.
Now, in this post, I'm assuming an animal rights framework.
Or animal welfare framework, for that matter - philosopher Richard Haynes is absolutely right that if you take the welfare of animals seriously, the result looks a lot like animal rights. The reason people habitually assume that "animal welfare" is compatible with something much like the status quo is that they both use ad hoc conceptions of welfare taylored to reach this conclusion rather than conceptions that are plausible for independent philosophical reasons - and, also, that they don't put too high a priority on welfare, even according to their own ad hoc conception. It's something we should care about to the extent that it doesn't disrupt present-day animal industries, but no more than that.
Anyway. I'm not arguing for animal rights/serious animal welfare in this post, I use it as a premise.
I'm also not gonna argue, but simply state, that it follows from the above position that animals should be legal persons rather than legal property (though we may have lots of arguments about the details), and that you can't slaughter animals for food or use them for invasive scientific experiments (I'm planning another post on this last topic, but here I'm just saying).
BUT: Does it follow that we can't have companion animals? Does it follow that humans should live in human civilization and animals should live out in nature and we should have minimal interaction?
The traditional animal rights answer has been "yes", but this is where we face "the animal rights trilemma".
All of the following three options are morally problematic:
1. Domestic animals reproduce at will.
2. Domestic animals continue to exist and reproduce, and live with us as companion animals, possibly some do various jobs (jobs they enjoy, like various sniffing/tracking/searching jobs for dogs), but we control their reproduction.
3. We exterminate all domestic animals through universal castration or sterilization, or by keeping all fertile animals apart from fertile members of the opposite sex without exception.
Number 1 is the only acceptable solution for humans. Sure, we can and should educate humans about reproduction, offer birth control etc, but sterilizing people without their consent, sticking IUDs in wombs without the owners' consent and similar is a violation of human rights. However, allowing all cats, dogs etc to reproduce at will would be disastrous, and everyone knows it. No one argues for 1. (Someone might think this goes to show that as a blanket rule you can't compare humans and non-humans, but that doesn't follow logically and I think it's blatantly false. In many other areas such comparisons are apt - it just doesn't work when it comes to reproduction.)
Philosophers Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson argue for a version of 2. Famous Kantian philosopher Christine Korsgaard has expressed more uncertainty about how to extend Kant's "an end in themself" principle to non-humans, beyond the animal rights basics I lay out in the beginning of this post, but she also leans towards 2. Of course, in a society committed to animal rights, any breeding/controlled reproduction of animals would look very different from much that goes on today. Today, we have forced breeding of many animal species, breeding for features that cause a lot of suffering - e.g., chickens who grow to "slaughter size" in a month, flat faces in pug dogs - and, generally, breeding and selling animals for profit. Of course we shouldn't do any of that. But even very animal friendly breeding practices would entail doing things to non-human animals that would count as gross human rights violations if done to humans.
This brings us to number 3, the traditional animal rights position. However, animal rights advocates have traditionally expressed themselves in vague and euphemistic ways, talked of how we should "let them die out", "not create any more of them" etc, as if we merely needed to sit back and do nothing for domestic animals to disappear from the face of the Earth within a generation. This is very much not the case. If we want a world devoid of domestic animals, we'd have to be very active, very diligent about our extermination project. Also, we would do something that would count as genocide if done to a group of humans.
Answers to common objections:
- Yes, it's genocide even if you don't murder anyone, you only make sure that no one in the group can reproduce and get rid of them that way.
- Yes, it's genocide even if you think of your intentions as benevolent. It's genocide even if your motive is to save this group from oppression - we're only gonna continue oppressing them if they exist, but if they don't exist anymore, we can't oppress them either! It's genocide even if you think this group is so sad and tragic and therefore the world would be a better place without them.
- No, it's not some minor wrong because it's temporary, because once the group is gone you can't hurt them anymore. That's not how the morality of genocide works.
I also believe most proponents of 3 seriously underestimate how difficult it would be in practice to get rid of all domestic animals. First, it's gonna be incredibly difficult to castrate/sterilize/forever keep away from members of the opposite sex every single one of them. Second, even if we manage to do that, animals can self-domesticate.
Many researchers now believe that dogs, cats, and perhaps some other species too originally self-domesticated. Life among humans does have many perks compared to life in the wild! That's not to say (seriously, some people try to argue this, but it's such a bad argument) that domestic animals kinda consent to being treated the way they are. First, self-domestication was maaaaaany animal generations ago, not something the present generation chose, and in any case, choosing a life among humans doesn't entail choosing anything we throw at them. It doesn't work like that for humans either.
Thought experiment: Suppose I decided to take a job where I was required to live on company grounds, in some company village, with my family. Suppose I made the decision because it seemed great and much preferable to my present, in many ways precarious, situation. Once I move in there it turns out that I'm locked up in a tiny cell 24/7 and will be murdered in a year. Clearly I didn't consent to this just because I willingly accepted the job and moved into the village!
However. The phenomenon of self-domestication creates a problem for proponents of Number 3, because they must have a plan for how to handle presently wild animals who try to self-domesticate and move in with humans in the future. In a society committed to animal rights, where we no longer hunt or otherwise kill animals, life among humans will look attractive to many species who presently like to live near us or even live discreetly among us, like foxes and deer. A policy to actively keep animals from domesticating themselves, because you believe that animals should live out in nature and humans here in civilization and we shouldn't mix, looks a little like a policy to keep immigrants out because you believe that each people should live in their country and we shouldn't mix. Once again, we stumble into something morally problematic.
I'm going with 2 of the options above, though as I say, it's not unproblematic, and there's lots to discuss and debate regarding details. In any case, I think it's vital that everyone recognizes that there are moral problems with all of them, 3 included - 3 doesn't entail some morally neutral passivity where we just "let them die out".
