Animal rights, domestic animals, and self-domestication

I've been thinking about writing this post since I was tagged on social media a while ago, under an article arguing that it's morally wrong to keep pets. And then I just never got around to it. But now my Swedish-language Facebook feed actualized the discussion again, via Swedish articles on the same topic. So, finally, here it comes: another post on domestic animals, and why I believe in animal rights but not in getting rid of all domestic animals.

I've previously posted about it here:  trilemma for animal rights . In that post, I only mentioned the issue of self-domestication briefly, towards the end. In this post I will focus on it.

What non-human animals don't want - and what they do want

The following isn't an exhaustive list by any means. But clearly, non-human animals don't want to
- live in cramped conditions
- be slaughtered
- live intensely boring lives, devoid of stimulation
- be scared and threatened into submission
- have their babies taken away at early ages
- have their entire lives micro-managed and controlled, with very little in the way of choice
- have their bodies mutilated (like the grotesque practice of cutting off dog tails and pieces of their ears, long-sinced banned in many European countries but still legal in the US - to any American readers of this blog: we have science on this! All the alleged health benefits you've heard of are nothing but rationalizations and lies!)
- be ill and suffering (often a result of both extreme breeding - for conformation shows or for food production - and cramped, stressful living conditions)

etc.

However, non-human animals do want 
- regular access to sufficient food and water
- shelter
- enough warmth
- protection against predators
- good health

Now, there's this widespread idea in animal rights circles that whereas domestic animals are dependent on humans for having their needs met, wild animals "manage just fine on their own". However, this is a failure of distinguishing species from individuals. Wild animal individuals often suffer in various ways and die young. We humans might look at a flourishing ecosystem and see the beautiful balance of nature. But for every animal who dies young from starvation, from an injury that could have been easily treated by a veterinarian, or is killed and eaten by a predator, it sucks.  Non-human animals aren't gonna console themselves by singing Circle of Life like in Disney's the Lion King.

Life in the wild is hard 

Now, there's a philosophical debate on whether humans have a duty to mitigate wild animal suffering if we could. Positions range from the claim that it's good to have as little wilderness and as few wild animals as possible, since wild animals live such shit lives (utilitarian philosopher William MacAskill) to the idea that wild animals should be considered citizens in their own sovereign nations, which we ought not to invade (political and animal rights philosophers Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka). Andrée-Ann Cormier and Mauro Rossi argue that D&K's arguments don't hold up. We gotta fall back, after all, on the sheer impossibility of large-scale interference in nature without making things worse. (I feel drawn to D&K's position, I find Cormier and Rossi's view unsatisfying, but I nevertheless believe that their counter arguments hold up.) Neo-Kantian Christine Korsgaard argues that there is inherent value in the existence of all these wild animal species. And so on. It's a big debate.

In any case, regardless of any duties we may or may not have to wild animals, their lives are clearly hard. Let's take a look at wild animal reproduction, and ponder the extent to which most of them must die young in order for populations to remain stable. 
Some wild animals have extreme reproduction rates. At the end of pregnancy (or whatever the correct term is for this species), the male seahorse will spawn thousands of babies, the vast majority of which will promptly be gobbled up by other fish. 
Mammals never have that many babies, but some still reproduce really fast by mammal standards. Guinea pigs, for instance, are pregnant for two months, give birth to around four babies, immediately mate and become pregnant again, whereas the babies, in turn, hit puberty and become pregnant when they're a couple of months old, so they give birth themselves at the same time their second round of siblings are born. This means that if left unsupervised and unkilled, two guinea pigs of opposite sexes will have become twenty-two guinea pigs in eight months time. In sixteen months, if they continue to breed at the same pace and no one is killed, 240-250. In two years time, upwards to 3000. (I was tired doing this piece of maths. You can double-check if you like. Two months pregnancy time, a new pregnancy directly after birth, two months to puberty, around four babies per litter.) (If I'm not mistaken, guinea pigs were the inspiration behind Star Trek's tribbles). The reason South America - where they live wild - isn't covered by a thick living blanket of guinea pigs by now, is that they're eaten by predators all the time. 
Now, guinea pigs are pretty extreme as mammals go, but there are many wild animals both better at surviving and with slower reproduction. Horses reproduce and age pretty slowly. Wild horses typically wait till they approach adulthood at age two-three before getting pregnant the first time. Pregnancy lasts almost a year, results in a single baby, and the mum often waits a year before getting pregnant again. Domestic ponies that resemble their wild ancestors often live to be thirty years of age or even older. Wolves also reproduce and age relatively slowly, albeit not quite as slowly as horses. They, too, tend to wait until the age of two before reproducing, but their pregnancies are shorter, they give birth every year, and to a litter rather than a single baby. Wolves can live into their teens. Also, both horses and wolves reproduce faster when they have enough food than when food is scarce. 

Now. You do the math. How quickly would horse and wolf populations grow if every individual had a good and relatively long life? Not guinea-pig-fast by any means, but pretty fast nevertheless. Stable echo systems depend on tons of individual animals living harsh lives and dying young from starvation, from being brutally killed by other animals, from illnesses or injuries that, in many cases, could have been easily treated by a veterinarian if they had access to one. Species may "manage just fine" without human aid, but most individuals do not.

Self-domestication in the past and the present

This is why many animals approach human settlements, preferring to live among us rather than out in the wild. In the past, people assumed that all domestic animals species came about because brave ancient humans captured wild animals and purposefully tamed and dominated them. Now, researchers believe that many species have, to a large extent, self-domesticated - they sought out and approached humans because we have food and shelter and that kind of stuff. Humans, in turn, accepted to have cats around because they killed rats that stole their food, accepted to have wolves around because they scared off rival humans and quickly learnt cooperative hunting, and so on. Only later did humans begin to consciously breed them for our own purposes. Given all that humans have to offer, and given how hard life is in the wild, this is absolutely no mystery. And it's not just a thing of the past: we see how non-domestic animals approach us and choose to live among us today as well. 

Donaldson and Kymlicka coined the term "liminal animals" for species or subgroups within species that have adapted to life among humans, without being domesticated. These animals are often completely forgotten in discussions about animal rights; such discussions tend to focus on domestic animals like dogs, cats, horses and "food animals" on the one hand and completely wild animals way out in nature on the other. But if someone had the concept of liminal animals explained to them and then asked to list some, they might spontaneously mention rats, plus a long list of birds: Canada geese, crows, magpies, and lots of little birds like house sparrows and tree sparrows that mostly lives in towns and cities. In Europe, hedgehogs are common, and often make their nests underneath people's porches or garden sheds. 
Besides rats and hedgehogs, some mammals are beginning to split up into a city version and a forest version. Foxes are shy and nocturnal and therefore rarely seen, but many of them have lived for generations in towns and cities. If forced to move back to the forest, many would have a hard time adapting to such a different lifestyle. Individual foxes sometimes get closer to humans and take up residence in someone's garden - it's sufficiently common that different foxes doing this with different people regularly pop up on social media. Some individuals are clearly less shy than others. 
Groups of Scandinavian roe deer have taken up permanent residence in city suburbs, and many of them aren't shy at all. They may keep grazing while humans walk by at a few meters distance.

So, what follows from all of this? What follows from the fact that animals often choose to live with humans, even choose to begin the domestication process? Certainly, it doesn't follow that we have the right to kill them and eat them, use them as toys for our amusement, restrict and micro-manage their lives for our convenience, and so on. However, it does follow that if animal rights become the dominant ideology in society and we decide that 
a) all domestic animals should be wiped out via universal castration, and 
b) humans should live in human society, and animals should stay out in nature, at a respectful distance from us
- this will be something that we force on them. It would be our choice, not theirs.

Moreover, it means that keeping them out would require a never-ending battle from our side.

The three categories

Donaldson and Kymlicka envision three legally distinct categories of animals in their animal rights utopia:

1. Domestic animals are no longer property, but citizens in our nations. Besides a strong right to life and a right not to be harmed, they have substantive positive rights to food, shelter, health care, a strong pro tanto right to free movement (you need much more than human convenience and preference to infringe on this right), and the training required to handle a life intimately connected with humans. They also have some obligations to adapt and contribute, depending on their individual abilities: they may provide companionship, which in turn improves human physical and mental health, or do various more specific jobs. (Note: Being killed isn't a job. But search dogs or land-mine sniffing rats could be said to do proper jobs; they contribute to society in a way that's frequently fun and engaging for the animal as well.)

2. Liminal animals have far weaker rights. They still have a right to life, and a right not to be completely pushed out of human society. But we're allowed, to some extent, to use both conscientious cleaning of public spaces (population sizes depend a lot on how much garbage there's around) and "hostile architecture" to prevent them from becoming too many. D&K also note that domestic animals like cats and dogs have a deterrent effect on many liminal species, and this effect would be greater with greater freedom of movement for dogs.

3. Wild animals, basically left to their own devices (though D&K discuss, at some length, ways to improve road safety for wild animals, and how we have an obligation to do so). 

Animals are allowed to move between categories if they choose. D&K note that liminal or wild animals sometimes seek help from humans, which in time might lead to them living a more domestic life. Domestic animals might also turn liminal or wild. This is common already with cats, who frequently move between categories. D&K speculate that many domestic horses might turn to a wilder lifestyle if they had the chance. 

There are lots of problems with the details in D&K's vision. Nevertheless, at least they try to discuss all these categories, and the fact that animals can choose both to withdraw more from humans and to go the opposite direction and approach us. But traditional animal rightsers, who want to wipe out every domestic animal until only wild ones remain - how are they even gonna do that in practice?

The never-ending battle to keep them out

Let's assume we have managed to castrate every single domestic animal, thus wiping entire species out. In practice, this is extremely unlikely to succeed. It's one thing to quit assisting animals that are incapable of natural reproduction. But many, many domestic animals can mate and give birth without our aid. As soon as animals aren't locked up in cages anymore but allowed more freedom of movement, preventing them from mating requires diligence and active intervention on our part. Sure, animals can be castrated, but doing so before they hit puberty often has negative health consequences. Controlling populations is one thing. Completely wiping them out, not a single one left - way harder. And this isn't even touching on the existence of cats and other animals that frequently move back and forth between domestic and more liminal or even wild life-styles. 
Anyway. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that this mass castration has been successful, and all domestic species we currently have are wiped off the face of the Earth.

Now, how are we gonna stop wild and liminal animals from self-domestication?

Animals have willingly approached humans, moved into our town and cities, begged food from us, begged us for shelter, and begun the process of domestication even as we kept killing them. Deer and foxes move into our suburbs and cities and sometimes openly approach us despite being hunted and killed en masse by humans, and despite the fact that scary scary dogs are everywhere in human society. Now, imagine that we live in an animal rights utopia instead, where no one kills any animals and all those scary dogs have been wiped out. Life among humans look super attractive now, to a wide variety of species.

So, what are we supposed to do when they approach us and beg for food, shelter, want to enter our houses when the winter is cold enough, and so on? Well, one option is we take them in. We let our hearts melt for them and help them out as best we can. But oops, now we must control their reproduction somehow, or else, their populations will grow until they flood our societies. We must somehow sort out their relationships when both deer and foxes want to live with the same family, but the fox wants to eat the deer's baby. We must guide them and to some extent train them in how to interact with and manage all the complicated human stuff - humans, other city-dwelling species, cars and vehicles and so on. And when we've done all this, we have new domestic animal species! 
Which made the whole business of wiping out our previous ones pretty pointless in the end. We could just as well have kept the old ones around.* 

The other option is to keep the non-humans out. Our cities and towns must be super clean. Also, architecture and city planning must be super hostile to all non-humans. Whenever a new building, new park or similar is planned, we must ask ourselves: how can we make this fine for humans, while at the same time making it as hostile as we possibly can to all non-humans? 
In addition, we must learn to harden our hearts when injured or starving animals approach us and beg for assistance - remember, animals sometimes do this already despite the fact that we hunt and kill them - they will surely do so more often if we stop doing that. But as soon as we help them out, we're on a slippery slope towards domestication. Thus, our relationships with many animal species cannot just consist of "letting them be" - rather, it will be coloured by a constant battle to keep them away from us, and conscious efforts not to empathize with individuals in need. 

Traditional animal rightsers often doubt that any respectful and reciprocal co-existence with domestic animals is possible; they're just too dependent on us, and therefore too vulnerable and likely to be abused. I do think this is a serious problem, but it's one we gotta grapple with (this goes for vulnerable and dependent humans - like children! - as well). Because, it's even less plausible that a respectful animal rights ideology can flourish at the same time as we constantly strive to keep animals away from us and not empathize with individual animals in need. 

 Some final thoughts on "adopt don't shop"

People who believe that we should have that last generation of domestic animals and then no more often preach "adopt don't shop". An end to domestic animals requires an end to breeding. Thus, we must not support breeding, but we should still "adopt up" all animals currently in existence. Don't worry, pet lover! That pet-free future is just that - a future that will, some day, happen. Right now, you can have any pet you like. All you have to do is adopt one! If there's no pet of your preferred type close to where you live, don't worry. It's a big world and there are so many shelters all over the globe. You can just order your preferred pet online. Of course we're against pets, of course they should all die out, but right now, there's an abundance of them, and you can have the precise type of pet you want. 

Now, we know, because such cases have been discovered, that some "rescue organizations" actually have dogs that reproduce freely, and then they sell the offspring abroad as "rescues". In the US (and probably other places too where big puppy mills are legal), there are also rescue organizations that "rescue" dogs by buying them from puppy mills and then pass them on to "adopters". I think people who run these organizations often sincerely believe that they're doing a good thing, rescuing one batch after another the only way they can (because heaven forbid they would break in and steal the dogs!). Perhaps some "rescue organizations" with freely reproducing dogs started out with good intentions, but they lost control of the dog situation when they had rescued too many. Other organizations might be deliberate scams. But they exist, and have their customers. 

A few years ago, it was popular among Swedish dog rescuers to order dogs online from Russian shelters. People seemed to think they were diligent and checked that they got their dog "from a reputable organization" by noting
a) the Russian organizers sounded nice via email, and
b) they talked to other people who had dogs from the same organization, and their dogs were cute and nice. 
Of course, both a) and b) are completely irrelevant to the question: is this a legit rescue organization or some kind of puppy mill? Then, it turned out - first in customs, then via a more thorough investigation from the Swedish Board of Agriculture - that most of the dogs from a big Russian batch sent to Swedish rescures lacked proper vaccination. They had the papers, but hadn't had the shots. Other customs checks have turned out similar results. Many imported rescue dogs don't have the shots that their papers claim they have. Best case scenario is these are mistakes made because the rescue organization is doing such a hard job and they're overwhelmed. Worst case scenario, the dogs originate with cynical money-making operations. Have the dogs reproduce freely in a big enclosure, give them the cheapest possible food, you might still spay or neuter dogs you're gonna sell (but with the cheapest vet you can find) since the new owner will notice, but you save money on skipping various shots and have the vets falsify the papers. 

I'm not saying it's impossible to do your due diligence before adopting a pet, even if you adopt from abroad. You might, for instance, have volunteered at the shelter yourself, or personally visited the shelter, or maybe a person you know have done so. But the simple, snappy "adopt don't shop" message predictably results in lots of people thinking it's okay to buy any pet you want, it's okay to order pets online from countries you've never been to, etc., as long as it's billed as "adoption" or "rescue". That practice will never lead to "a last generation". 

Now, brace yourselves. I really want to preface the coming paragraph by saying that I do not compare human children and dogs. I do think that humans and dogs - human children in particular - are similar in lots of ways, and I can point to lots of research backing this up. But people often find comparisons provocative, and might suspect (sometimes justifiably so!) that a particular, already marginalized group of humans is picked out as being particularly beastly or animal-like. So I really want to stress that the following paragraph doesn't hinge on any particular similarities. I merely make the point that when there's a strong demand, we can be certain that someone will create a supply chain to fill said demand - even when doing so requires engaging in horrible crimes.
A huge and decades-long international adoption scandal is currently unraveling in Sweden. Sweden has plenty of childless couples, but almost no domestic orphans. There was thus a strong demand for orphans to adopt. Entire adoption agencies grew up that largely relied on stealing people's children in the developing world and passing them off as orphans for adoption. This happened despite the fact that human trafficking is a very serious crime, and despite the sheer logistical difficulties involved. 
Breeding animals and pretending they're rescues will always be way easier than human trafficking. Of course people will continue to do so, as long as there's a huge demand for rescued pets. 

As mentioned above, I don't believe we should try to wipe out domestic animals. But people promoting this idea should stop promoting an accompanying "adopt don't shop" message, and instead urge people to go pet-free here and now.  

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*I'm all for extinguishing species/breeds for which life is full of suffering due to their physiology, such as broiler chickens or flat-nosed dogs. Also, any animal rights utopia would have far fewer domestic animals, not this extreme mass production of "food animals" we currently see,  and also fewer animals of pet species. All I'm saying is that completely wiping out all domestic animals is pointless if we end up having new domestic species later on.