Pet Ethics

Ray Briggs
Do we really have the right to own our fellow creatures?

Josh Landy
Are there some animals that should never be kept as pets?

Ray Briggs
Is it okay to de-claw a cat or to clip a bird’s wings?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you from our respective shelters in place via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy and Josh directs the philosophy and literature initiative.

Josh Landy
Today we’re thinking about pet ethics. Is it okay to own an animal?

Ray Briggs
Oh Josh, it’s not just okay, it’s a moral requirement—everybody should have a dog.

Josh Landy
Come on, Ray. I mean, if you really love dogs, I don’t think you should be encouraging everybody to get one. I mean, look, a lot of people get a dog at Christmas and, and then they can’t care for them properly. And that poor dog ends up at a shelter or stuck at home alone all day.

Ray Briggs
Okay, maybe those people shouldn’t get a hermit crab or something. But everybody should have some sort of a pet.

Josh Landy
I don’t even know about hermit crabs. I mean, they’re wild animals, right? I mean, shouldn’t they be allowed to swim free with the waves flowing through their claws?

Ray Briggs
It’s not like their owners are hurting them, as long as they get enough food and sunlight and, like, whatever hermit crabs need.

Josh Landy
Okay, but even if you provide for them material needs, it just seems unfair to have total power over their lives. I mean, how can you own another living being?

Ray Briggs
Oh Josh, what is freedom to a hermit crab? It just doesn’t have the kind of brain that cares about that.

Josh Landy
Alright, I’ll grant you. That’s probably true for hermit crabs, Ray, but other animals have more complicated needs—like your beautiful dog Blossom. Are you really giving her enough so she can live her best life?

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah, absolutely! I feed her. I walk her. I take her to the vet. I call her my sweet cinnamon roll.

Josh Landy
Alright, okay, so you’re doing the bare minimum.

Ray Briggs
No, no, no, I’m not done yet. I do enrichment training with her every day. I bring her to work. In fact, she’s here right now. Hey, you want to say hi? Hey, Blossom? Blossom—speak!

Josh Landy
Okay, all right, I take it bac, Ray—you’re clearly a great pet owner. But that sure sounds like a lot of work. I just wonder whether most people can manage to provide their pets with that same level of care?

Ray Briggs
Well, not every pet requires as much care as a dog. You could get a cat or a hamster or a goldfish.

Josh Landy
Okay, but on the other side, not every pet requires as little care as a dog. What about people who keep monkeys and sugar gliders? Or even parrots for that matter?

Ray Briggs
What about parrots?

Josh Landy
Well, if you want to give a power a proper parrot life, you have to let it fly.

Ray Briggs
Isn’t there any kind of pet you think the average person can take care of properly?

Josh Landy
Sure, a tamagotchi pet. Or a chia pet.

Ray Briggs
You know you have to water a chia pet, right?

Josh Landy
Fair enough. But I feel like even an absent minded Ppofessor like myself could probably just about manage to do that.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, luckily not everyone’s like you. We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Shereen Adel, to talk to happy pet owners about why they bring animals into their homes. She files this report.

Shereen Adel
When you think of pets, you might think of dogs or cats. Last year when I decided I was ready for pets, I adopted two kittens, Moose and Dusty. They’re really affectionate. They’re easy to take care of. And they communicate to tell me when they’re content or when they need something. But when I ask other people what kinds of pets they have,some of their answers surprised me.

Ben
I take care of two red-eared sliders. Those are aquatic turtles. Their names are Ganrah and Skeletor. And they’re both female.

Lauren
I have a careless guinea pig. Her name is olive which is short for olive oil can because she looks like an aluminum tin can with her fat little wrinkles on her sides.

Ben
After having her for like 12 years at least, she was digging a hole to play a clutch of eggs.

Lauren
She’s very food motivated. So if she ever sees you come into the room, she will be pretty actively verbose, chirping and making sounds.

Lexxi
We got our tree frog from a Home Depot tree actually. So it was a total surprise when I found her. I love that she’s not a cat or a dog to be honest. It’s just kind of a a different kind of pet that we weren’t even expecting.

Shereen Adel
According to the American Veterinary Medical Association after cats and dogs, fish and birds are the most popular pets. Rabbits ferrets, hamsters, and turtles also make the top ten. And it turns out reptiles are gaining popularity too.

Jessie Kilbourne
Right now I have two cats and two dogs as well as two reptiles.

Shereen Adel
Jessie Kilbourne is a zookeeper in Tampa, Florida. She says that after she started working with reptiles, she really started to love them.

Jessie Kilbourne
You don’t really think about the personalities that go along with them. And they do each have these wonderful, unique, individual personalities that are so much fun.

Shereen Adel
She says even though they aren’t like cats and dogs, one of her lizards is pretty social.

Jessie Kilbourne
My bearded dragon absolutely loves tactile at this point, it loves to be pet.

Shereen Adel
But her other reptile, a Uromastyx, or a spiny-tailed lizard doesn’t like a lot of human interaction.

Jessie Kilbourne
So he’s not a pet that I would encourage if you are wanting a lot of cuddle time, or you want to be able to pick them up and pet them all the time. But he’s so unique and he likes to run around on our floor and explore and our Great Dane desperately wants to be best friends with him.

Shereen Adel
For Jessie caring for a pet is about giving an animal the best life it can have. And that’s especially important when you give an animal that’s not domesticated a home. She got her lizard from a licensed rehabber after someone decided it wasn’t a good pet for them. That kind of thing happens a lot.

Jessie Kilbourne
People will get pet snakes from the pet store and think that they’re super cool. And look, I’m edgy. I have a snake and this is great, but they don’t do their research and they don’t realize that that snake is going to grow to be nine feet long.

Shereen Adel
As a zookeeper part of her job is to understand the environment that an animal needs to thrive when they’re in human care.

Jessie Kilbourne
We are constantly doing studies to make sure that the habitats that they are in are built to facilitate their needs to go beyond their needs to encourage natural behaviors for that specific species. Things are added in every single day to change that habitat so that it’s not the same all the time. It’s enriching, it’s exciting.

Shereen Adel
Jessie says when people realize they can’t take care of their exotic or specialty pet, they often release them into the wild. Not only is that bad for the animal survival, but it can be a problem for the environment too. Many states have restrictions on which animals can be kept as pets, specifically based on whether they could become pests when introduced into the wild. In California, for example, it’s illegal to own hedgehogs, gerbils or ferrets, even though they’re common pets elsewhere. So I asked Jesse, if it takes so much to keep wild animals and human care, shouldn’t we just leave them alone?

Jessie Kilbourne
My response to that would sort of be, what wild? Because we as humans keep growing, and we keep taking over their environments.

Shereen Adel
For a lot of people having pets is just fun. And if you know what you’re doing, you might also be giving them their best shot at survival. But for me, when it comes to pets, I’ll stick with my kitten

The Stray Cats
I got cat class, and I got cat style.

Shereen Adel
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Shereen Adel.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Shereen. I love kittens, too, though, you know, tree frogs, that sounds like fun, too. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about pet ethics.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Gary Varner, who’s a professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, and the author of “Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition.” Gary, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Gary Varner
Glad for being here. I really enjoy the program.

Josh Landy
So Gary, What first got you started on pet ethics? Do you, I don’t know, keep large cats in your backyard?

Gary Varner
Oh, no. I had various pets as a kid like lizard and a hamster and so on who hamsters were just mentioned. But what really has gotten me most interested in pets as as an adult, most of my adult life, I’ve kept cats as pets. And then in 2011, I adopted a pregnant feral cat from a nearby colony. Wow, by literally trapping her in my house before she gave birth. And living with her the last nine years has been very challenging, but also very rewarding, more rewarding than any other relationship I’ve had with a cat.

Ray Briggs
So philosophically speaking, how should people describe their relationship to their pets? Do you think they’re like friends or like children or what?

Gary Varner
Well, I think we can have substantially different kinds of relationships with pets. For instance, the some of the pets you guys just mentioned are not really suited, I think to be coming true companions. So like the fish that was mentioned, in the way that dogs and cats are very well suited to becoming companions because they’ve been, you know, either fully domesticated or partially. And then I’d like to use the term domesticated partner to refer to pets who work in fairly sophisticated ways with their humans. In ways that exercise the pets, mental and physical abilities in healthy ways. So I think you can have a much better, more nuanced and two way relationship with a cat than with a frog. But then think about a dog who has a working dog or runs agility courses, in contrast to a lap cat, do you have a much more sophisticated relationship with him.

Josh Landy
Is that how you describe your relationship with your feral cat? Would you think that is a companionship relationship or what?

Gary Varner
I would say it’s primarily a companionship relationship. But cats are, you know, they have a bad rap that is not deserved as not being trainable. But I think that people, anybody can work with cats, training wise in ways that will improve the quality of their relationship from both ends. So I’ve taught Maggie my feral cat, to stop doing something or not do something when I say no, to come on command, and to go into a carrier to get her dinners. And that kind of basic training with cats is I describe it as kind of, I don’t know, cultivating to the extent practicable, a domesticated partnership with her. But cats are, I think, a primary example of we’re really suited to being companion animals.

Ray Briggs
So I’m curious about training. So I’ve often heard people say, when I train my dog, well, you shouldn’t pass your dog around. Do you think that training is bossing around? Or is there a better way to think of it?

Gary Varner
Not? Well, I’m not an expert on training. But my sense from what I’ve read and heard and doing it myself is, you don’t have to take the boss around approach, certainly not with a cat, they’re not going to do things if they don’t want to. And so you need to take the the approach of making it attractive to the cat to do what you want to dogs are a little more complicated case, I think, because in evolutionary terms, they thrive like wolves in a hierarchical structure of pack structure. And it’s often said that human pet keepers when they keep dogs become a need to become the dominant animal in the pack who, you know, leads the pack around as it were. But that doesn’t mean I forget what you said a second ago, you know, not forcing them to do things. But being in one sense, the boss, but maybe not boss.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I want to ask about dominance, actually, because it seems like a lot of the sort of stuff about like alpha pack structure with wolves was based on sort of faulty research. And so maybe I want to register a comment about dominance, but I’m not quite sure that’s the way I think about my relationship with my dog. But it seems to dominate a cat too.

Gary Varner
Yeah, well, how about leader instead of dominance? Dos that sound, you know, kinder and friendlier.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that makes more sense.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about pet ethics with Gary Varner from Texas A&Muniversity, our pets, our

Ray Briggs
Are pets our friends or our property? What does it mean to take “good enough” care of your cat or your dog? And is it ever okay to keep wild animals in your home?

Josh Landy
Lions and tigers and bears… as pets when Philosophy Talk continues.

Elvin Bishop
He’s a dog, that’s all he’ll ever be. He’s a dog, and that’s alright with me.

Josh Landy
Is your dog your partner, your property, or something in between? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about pet ethics with Gary Varner from Texas A&M University, the author of “Personhood, Ethics, and Animal cognition.”

Josh Landy
We’re still sheltering in place as we pre record this episode, so we aren’t able to take your phone calls. But you can always email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or tweet us—our handle is @philtalkradio.

Ray Briggs
So Gary, what if anything, gives us the right to keep other animals in our homes and make decisions about how every aspect of their lives is gonna go?

Gary Varner
Well, there’s there’s really widespread agreement about it a couple of basic kind of foundational points among the philosophers who have written about pets. One is that you acquire a specific obligations like of being a pet keeper, by things that you do. This is a familiar notion in our common sense morality that you know, signing a contract or saying I do create special obligations between you and another individual. And there’s general agreement that it like in the paradigm sort of case where I trapped my feral cat in my house. In doing so I became responsible for its well being and the corollary point in terms of the substance of your obligations and what the minimal criterion for being okay for you to keep them is that you provide for their physical and psychological needs, and ensure that they have at least one philosopher puts up a comparatively good life to what they would have had if you hadn’t taken them on as a pet.

Ray Briggs
Right so That raises questions for me about whether it’s okay not just to adopt a pet from a shelter, but sort of create new, like domesticated animals. So in that case, like, take somebody who breeds dogs, there’s not really a life that the dog would have had, if they hadn’t been created. So like, how do we think about the ethics of creating new domestic animals?

Gary Varner
Ah, breeding and bringing new ones into into existence. Yeah, I haven’t thought carefully as a philosopher about identity problems. But that those are in identity problems are widespread with human reproduction and other sorts of cases, future generations and so on. And I don’t have a particular line on that. I will say that I’ve always thought that people should adopt from shelters, for instance, or, you know, stray or feral animals, rather than to have purpose bred animals. And the basic rationale there in my thought is that there are already enough cats and dogs, for instance, around who don’t have an owner, that it doesn’t make sense to breed more for the purpose of ownership when there all of these diverse animals available already.

Ray Briggs
Right. Another question I wonder about sometimes is the idea of like keeping an animal in a kind of nuclear family arrangement, which is what I do with my dog, really, but in some places, you have sort of just populations of feral cats and dogs who are more part of the community, and that seems more egalitarian. So there’s a sort of small question about like, what would this individual have been doing if I had not taken this individual into my home? But there’s also like, what are animals in society doing that they might not have been doing? If we organize society differently? Like how, how should I think about those considerations?

Gary Varner
Well, feral cats, I have no apologies for trapping feral cat in my house, given that I socialized for kittens adopted amount to good homes. And she, by all lights now leads a perfectly satisfying life in my house with me, because of what life would be like for a feral cat, and you know, she already existed, there are no identity problems there. If I had not trapped her in my house, before she gave birth, there would be six more. Well, there would be six feral cats in the neighborhood, that aren’t there now. And given that the life of a feral cat I don’t think is as good as the life of a well kept companion animal than I think that I’ve improved their situation. And I also think that in the case of dogs, I think it’s very clear that living with human beings, that currently living in human society integrated into it, instead of in the wild, is natural to them, they’re naturally environment for the kind of selection that produced the modern dog, presumably, as a relative of the wolf. And when it comes to the cats, they’re not as thoroughly domesticated as naturally integrated into human society, as dogs. But the cats have occupied the same communities as humans, for 1000s of years going back at least, you know, 3700 years, I believe. So it seems to me that the question of what’s natural for a cat or a dog is significantly different than the question of what’s natural for a wild animal. That’s whose ancestors haven’t gone through the process of domestication.

Josh Landy
That’s a really good point. And I love your general rule of thumb, that if you’re giving the animal at least as good life, maybe a better life than it would have in the wild, then you know, you’re a morally strong ground. And so that leads me to a more philosophical question about where do you think we we clearly we have these intuitions that we have moral responsibility towards pets? Is it you know, are you with a rationalist? It’s because animals have reason just like us, are you with a sentimentalist animals have feelings and, you know, they can suffer just like us, or you with Kant that, you know, it’s ultimately if we mistreat animals, we’re likely to be bad people in other respects to where do you think our our I think, correct. moral intuitions come from that we have obligations towards our pets?

Gary Varner
Well, I think in utilitarian terms, ultimately, but I’m a two level utilitarian meaning I think there are good utilitarian reasons for not thinking like explicitly like a utilitarian, most of the time, so I go more than as you characterized it sentimentalist route. I think that from that perspective, from a utilitarian perspective, any entity that is sentience that has positively or negatively valence psychological states, counts, morally speaking. And so I think the proper way to think about how basing our relationships is they’re sentient beings. And in the case of cats and dogs, they’re sentient beings who have cohabited with us for a long time.

Ray Briggs
So the idea is, we should seek the greatest good for the greatest number but some of those number are animals, like cats and dogs.

Josh Landy
One tail, one vote.

Ray Briggs
So what’s this two level thing? Like? Where does that come in?

Gary Varner
Well, let me give you an example that I can relate to pet specifically, think about it. I characterize the utilitarian perspective, the principle of utility as saying, arrange things so that happying aggregate happiness is maximized. I don’t say do what will maximize aggregate happiness and this or that situation, arrange things. Because if you walked around consciously calculating like a utilitarian all the time, you wouldn’t make a very good friend or lover for your fellow human beings. And I think analogously people should at but in to level utilitarianism I call the intuitive level, people should love their animals, not for the sake of maximizing aggregate happiness or what benefits the humans get. But the same way that we think in a healthy human relationship. You love the individual for themself.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about pet ethics with Gary Varner from Texas A&M University. And Gary, you know, you were just saying, We should love our animals. And I agree with you. But we got a really interesting email from Cory in San Francisco who says, who, who quotes Les McCann from a song called Compared to What?” And here’s the quote: “Rired old ladies kissing dogs. I hate the human love of that stinking mutt. I can’t use it. Trying to make it real compared to what?” And Cory says my sentiments exactly. So Cory doesn’t seem to share our sets that we can and should love pets. What do you say to that, Gary?

Gary Varner
I think Cory shouldn’t own dogs.

Josh Landy
So you just think you just think it’s a case-by-case thing—some of us are, you know, temperamentally disposed to have pets and be benefited better by them and benefited and benefit them, but other people not?

Gary Varner
I don’t know if temperamentally in the sense of congenitally. But the circumstances of your life can you know lead you to not like dogs because of previous experiences? Or something? There’s the old question, are you a cat person or a dog person? And then also, Ray said earlier, something to the effect, not entirely seriously, perhaps that everybody should own a dog. Clearly people who are in a career that takes so much time away from the home, that they can’t adequately exercise the dog mentally and physically, probably shouldn’t have a dog. But he did add, of course, that there are other options. And they’ve got down to goldfish, I think in addition to cats as another option that’s less labor intensive, less demanding in the relationship with a human.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I didn’t mean that entirely. Seriously. Although I do wonder. So do I have a responsibility to cultivate my capacity for relationships with like others, including pets? So if you just had a hermit, who was happy without friends without pets? And who could have the ability to take care of a pet and love the pet but just decided not to? Would there be anything wrong with that, like, it doesn’t seem like the greatest good for the greatest number if they’re not exercising their capacities?

Gary Varner
Well, I think a basic part of the justification for ownership of pets, is that it makes the lives better, or at least can make the lives better of both the human pet owner and the animal. And there’s various kinds of evidence that keeping pets is good for human beings. So we get various benefits out of it. But as I said a second ago, there can be particularities of personal a person’s life that make it not so appropriate for them to have a dog for instance, as a pet, or maybe even a cat. But I also think in terms of you asking about, well, a hermit, who sounds like someone who shuns relationships with humans, I do in my work argue that pet owners should, should definitely try to keep companion animals rather than what I call mirror pets, like a goldfish, or a frog or something where you can’t really have any companionship relationship. But my rationale is that the benefits we get, and the animal companions get is better on both sides of the deal. In that case, then with a mere pet, like a goldfish or a frog. And I also argue on the cultivating relationships. Tangent, I argued that people should, to the extent practicable, as I said, a little while ago, cultivate domesticated partnerships through training with their animals, not all animals, maybe the goldfish or the frog, are suitable to that. But if you’re going to have a pet, you should cultivate relationship, your relationship with it. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say everybody, including this hypothetical hermit should keep pets.

Josh Landy
Right. But I think you’ve made a really strong case for being good for a lot of people and good for the animals in in the cases where those people are taking care of the animal loving them responsibly. I’m also a little bit curious about cases where it doesn’t go as well. So you know, I come from Britain. And then there’s a, you know, there’s kind of a cliche there, that many Brits like their dogs better than they like other people. And I wonder about cases where someone might be very good to their pet. And perhaps as you know, is it possible that as a consequence, they have maybe less love to go around? I don’t know. It’s certainly there. There. There are some, obviously, there are tragic cases of people abusing their, their, their pets. And there are also cases of people, you know, using their pets to bad ends, I mean, thinking about, you know, there’s a case in San Francisco in 2001, of someone who was killed by a pitbull, which is owned by a neo Nazi, who had clearly been mistreating this, this dog and, you know, training it up to be rather vicious. So what should we say about cases like those where things aren’t really it really aren’t going well at all?

Gary Varner
Well, there have been various studies examining the connection between abuse of animals and putting pets and abuse of other people. I can’t say that I know that literature well, and I don’t, but my impression is that it’s not a foregone conclusion or an established conclusion empirically, that people who mistreat animals are more likely to mistreat humans. And the other way around the the Brit who loves their dog more than they like other people, that might just be a lucky dog because of how much attention it’s going to get. So these are complicated issues. And I think we need to as a society, debate how we should best regulate with the goal of maximizing aggregate happiness, including that of non human animals in our society, how we can most effectively regulate pet keeping, that would include I think, banning entirely pet ownership of certain wild animals, like big cats, for instance. But communities and communities might make different decisions about that, beyond that.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I think about Kant’s line, he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also, in his dealings with men, and I read a stat, I don’t know how much to trust it. But 43% of mass killers that they were able to get data on, had had a history of abusing animals in there.

Gary Varner
That’s one of those kinds of studies that I’m referring to.

Josh Landy
But tell me more about big cats, you know, that I hate to refer to a notorious documentary that came out this year, but they raised a really intriguing moral question involved people who owned big cats endangered species, and they clearly were not treating those animals nearly well enough. But on the other hand, the argument the other side was, well, we’re keeping the numbers up of these endangered populations. Is there a debate there? Or is there clearly just are things clearly just going wrong in that case?

Gary Varner
Well, there’s certainly the debate about the legitimacy of zoos, for instance, sort of like the professional, big cat keepers. And the degree to which those programs are such breeding programs are really contributing to preserving the species, at least ultimately, in the wild. It you know, because habitat modification is one of the biggest obstacles to maintaining species in the wild, especially big predators bring carnivores usually have especially large ranges, but in terms of keeping them as pets. There are two things about big cats that I would emphasize from a policy perspective. And I’m not talking here about zoos, I’m talking about people, you know, in private homes, keeping big cats pose potentially a serious danger to their neighbors, and also keeping a big cat in ways that that that really fulfill its physical and psychological needs is a big task. And not everybody’s up to that. Now that ladder. Most point, of course, could be made with regard to relatively unknown dangers animals, like certain kinds of lizards, for instance, that the, the needs of the species are pretty complex, and you really need to know what you’re doing, but they don’t pose such a problem if they get loose.

Ray Briggs
So I want to ask actually, about zoos and animal sanctuaries. Like is that a way of keeping like sort of social collective pets? Is that a different thing? It does seem like a lot of zoos and animal sanctuaries keep animals partly for sort of the pleasure of humans.

Gary Varner
Well, I the Big Cat Sanctuary that I visited some years ago. The the people there the keepers, I would describe it as it had a pet relationship, a bit of a domesticated partnership relationship with the cats because they just fit all the criteria in terms of affection towards the animal and the animals needs depend on them. These are some of the basic features of what it means to really Be a pet. And but but the keepers really felt affection for those animals too. So it seems to me that conceptually, those animals do count as pets. And that’s true in zoos often, I think, to where the people responsible for them have that kind of attitude towards them. So I think they count as pets. But conceptually, but as a society, we want to think carefully about when we want whether or not we want to encourage and which people we want to encourage to keep those kinds of animals. And the overarching rationale in the case of big cats, for instance, would presumably need to relate in terms of my judgment about their situation would relate to preserving biodiversity, but getting the rubber to meet the road in terms of the animals. The species continued existence in the wild, is a further sort of gap between having zoos. That’s one of the the debate questions people always raises, while you’re maintaining genetic diversity, but it’s in here, it’s not out there.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about pet ethics with Gary Varner from Texas A&M University, author of “Personhood, Ethics and Animal Cognition.”

Ray Briggs
Should some people be barred from owning pets? Is a permit really enough to justify keeping an exotic animal? Is it okay to breed dogs with those weird pushed-in faces?

Josh Landy
Bulldogs, boxers, and Boston terriers—when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Cure
Love cats, love cats

Josh Landy
Love cats? I adore them! But should I own them? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Gary Varner from Texas A&M University. And we’re thinking about the ethics of pet ownership.

Josh Landy
So Gary, we’re gonna make use czar of pet ownership nationwide with with full power to change anything you want. That’s something we’d like to do around here. What’s your first move as czar of pets?

Gary Varner
Well, let me mention one that’s related to the situation with English Bulldogs that Ray just alluded to a second ago with a brachycephalic heads, for instance. I think there should be really significant changes in the ways that we think about what makes a good breed of dog. And rather than thinking about a good breed of dog looking like some ancestral archetype, as as various breeds maintained by the AKC, the American Kennel Club and similar associations in other countries, that’s what they’re trying to do is make a dog that has certain, a certain look about it. And I think that instead, if I could wave a philosophical wand and make this true overnight, I would create a line of what you might call certified companion bred dogs, which would consist of the initial generation, being animals that score well simultaneously on robust health across a lifetime. So they’re genetically robust, congenitally, tend towards robust physical health, that are also trainable, and low on aggression. And then each generation in the development of the breed, you would only breed the offspring who scored the highest on those measures simultaneously. And as the famous Russian experiment with silver foxes indicated, they, they were able to turn wild foxes into tame animals that are now sold as pets in as little as about 10 generations. So which all with already domesticated dogs, in a few generations, we could create a breed that would be very diverse in its appearance. But anybody who adopted a certified companion bred dog would know that that’s an animal that’s likely to live a very healthy life, be very susceptible for training, and also be low aggression and just be a great domesticated partner.

Ray Briggs
Do you think that that there is like enough uniformity in the needs of different people who want dogs? Like I guess I’m thinking like, somebody wants a couch potato dog versus somebody who wants an agility dog like this? should those be separate breeds?

Gary Varner
Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, within restrictions, I personally would approve of that. And you never know. In fact, you could in this under this idea, under this heading of certified companion bred dog breed because I was saying, you know, start from a wide variety of dogs who score not the basis of how they look, but how they score on these kinds of tests. And it’s not inconceivable to me that some, you know, larger breeds that tend to be less active as we know them today could have a part in such a program and produce like a sub lineage that were larger, less active dogs that were less work to take care of. Ah, neat. But if I could add one related point and this this does relate to the faces of English Bulldogs. It concerns me that people still think of pets as replaceable, in the sense that I know people who when they have a dog of a certain breed, and the dog dies, they immediately get another dog of the same breed, as if what they’re thinking is that they’re replacing the previous dog with the new one. And it’s a real replacement, because it’s the same breed, it looks the same, maybe it has some of the same habits. But if we have really loving relationships with our pets, I think we get more out of the relationship and probably the pets too. So in loving relationships with other humans, we don’t think if your spouse dies, that I’m going to go out and find me another spouse who looks like they did. We think I’m going to meet somebody who might look completely different, have different character, personality characteristics, but I’ll learn to love will develop a loving relationship to that’s not based on something as superficial as the shape of your skull is in the case of English Bulldogs.

Ray Briggs
This also makes me sort of wonder about sort of issues relating to like the end of your pets life. So one thing that a lot of people do at the end of their pets life is is euthanize them, which seems like a really strange thing to do to a creature you love. But it also seems strange to like, just watch the creature you love suffer? Do you have? Do you have thoughts about how to handle that transition? Well,

Gary Varner
I happen to think in the case of humans that there are times when you should euthanize including actively euthanize someone under you know, some pre specified conditions. And I think that a being opposed to ending a life that’s on a bad downward trajectory is a bad thing, either in the case of humans we love or in case of the animals we love, and with my previous generation of cats, I did in the end, have each of them euthanize, but it was when their lives really did not promise to go well, from then on out. I don’t think that’s a sign of lack of love. I hope that people will love me enough to let me depart sentience, existence, when things look as bad as they may look someday, for various people.

Josh Landy
I agree with what you’re saying, and I, you know, I, to this day, I’m marked by the loss of my wonderful cat and absolutely, euthanasia felt like the right thing to do very painful, but the right thing to do. And also, the prolongation of her life felt like the right thing to do. But I want to ask you a devil’s advocate question about that, because, like many people, I spent quite a bit of money on prolonging my cat’s life. And somebody might say, not me, but somebody might say, I could have given that money to charity, I could have kept a human being alive, perhaps with that money. How what’s the argument for, for doing what I did, which is spending a lot of money to keep my cat alive for a little bit longer?

Gary Varner
Yeah, I spent a lot of money keeping one of my cats that I was referring to a second ago live a lot longer. If you think from the perspective of to level utilitarian, there are some kind of paradoxical results. And one of them that I believe in is that everybody in our society should have simultaneously the intuition, that money is no object for the human being I love and analogously with an animal who’s really important to me, but at the same time, when it comes to setting public policy, we should also have the intuition or the judgment that we have to make choices as a society about where resources are best spent. And that’s going to inevitably mean you don’t spend as much as possible on every single individual and human families who face the decision about whether to prolong the life of an animal or a human member of the family meet a similar sort of pair of contrasting, pulling in different directions, judgments, the intuitive judgment that no we love our brother or sister or mother or father, and no amount of money is too much to spend. But there’s that reality call standing in the background of you don’t want to bankrupt the family, for the sake of a few extra years of low quality life. So that’s a judgment that’s a trade off that we face in not just with regard to pets, but also humans.

Ray Briggs
So here’s another place where what utilitarianism tells me seems a little bit different from what I would want to do. When I’m deciding which pet to adopt. One way to do it is to think what is the most efficient way to choose an animal that will by adopting them will will maximize sort of happiness for everybody. And another way to do it is to go to the shelter and see Which animal do I like? Like, which which one speaks to me? And it seems like utilitarianism would leave me no room to ask, Well, what animal do I feel a specific attachment to? Is it okay? For me to just choose an animal based on like, who I feel an attachment to, rather than who I sort of anticipate would would bring me the greatest utility over the course of my life and who I anticipate I would give the greatest utility to.

Gary Varner
Yeah, well, in this context, let me remind you of what I said earlier about, well, if you’re somebody who walks around thinking, calculating utilitarian terms about whether or not you know whom to love another human being, or about whether to keep the promise to your spouse, you know, to meet at the movie theater or whatever, you’re not going to be maximizing aggregate happiness as effectively as you would, if you internalize an intuitive response of, well, I don’t break promises, period, even though we all acknowledge that there can be extreme conditions, where you need to get over that intuition, and act accordingly. And similarly, when it comes to adopting a pet animal, I 100% adopted my feral cat, not through a utility calculation, but because when I first saw her in my backyard, I remember to this day out there, she wouldn’t come near me for a long, long, long, long time after that. But what I saw was not just a pretty cat, but I saw a nice cat, despite the fact that she’s feral. And I knew it. And seeing a nice cat basically means the same thing you were describing a second ago of that animal just spoke to me somehow. And that’s an analogue of what we do with our fellow human beings, in terms of friendship, and loving relationships, and so on. And I don’t think we should apologize for conditioning ourselves to think that way. Even though according to a two level utilitarian, if you’re thinking in terms of public policy, or the laws for your community, about pet ownership, then you need to take a very different perspective, and explore explicitly utilitarian one. But I would I argue, in my work that any version of utilitarianism that doesn’t allow for these intuitive responses that we can condition ourselves into, that aren’t explicitly utilitarian and maybe don’t maximize aggregate happiness in this or that various situations, we live a better life. And we actually maximize happiness, if we arrange things that way, rather than arranging so that we all walk around doing utility calculations all the time

Ray Briggs
I like the way that your theory leaves room for things that maybe a more traditional kind of utilitarianism would just leave out. I’m wondering if it also has a place for sort of the value of freedom and if animals can have freedom that’s valuable. So one thing about a stray cat is that even if their life might be sort of less nice on a day to day level, they can sort of decide when they come and when they go and what they get to do. And it seems like a cat that lives in your house that you sort of keep shut indoors all the time, doesn’t get that same freedom. Is that is that a value that animals can have?

Gary Varner
I’m not sure what I want to say about that, other than to point out that well, in the in the field of Animal Science, where which studies production, animal agriculture, there are some really clearly drawn lines along which people differ with regard to what constitutes the well being of an animal. One is based on both can it exhibit its natural repertoire of behaviors. And that one, if you stick just to that narrow line doesn’t take in feelings, the subjective feelings of the animal. Another line, which for a long time was a small minority among animal scientists says, No animal, animal well being is all about feelings. And I don’t know where to come down there, other than to say that my commitment to utilitarian feels plausible to me, because I think what ultimately matters are the experiences of sentient animals. And I can’t, I don’t know what to say about freedom per se. Other than in the spirit of utilitarianism, I would look at the life of an animal who had that freedom. However, you described it a second ago to come and go as they please, for instance, or other conception of freedom, and then compare the subjective life of an animal who’s a house cat, and you know, doesn’t get to do that. So but I’m not sure where it come down on freedom, per se, as a value it one way or another, I’m committed to thinking has to get cashed out in terms of the experiences of the animal or the human.

Josh Landy
Well, Gary, you’ve been a fantastic companion today, and it’s been super illuminating. Thanks so much for joining us.

Gary Varner
Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Gary Varner, professor of philosophy at Texas a&m University, and author of “Personhood, Ethics, and Animal cognition. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I really like a lot of the changes that Gary is advocating for in the way we think about dogs in society. Not just that we need to meet their basic needs, but that we should be helping them to flourish and we should be breeding dogs that will flourish and adopting them from animal shelters rather than producing a lot of surplus ones

Josh Landy
Totally agree this conversation continues philosophers corner on our online community of thinkers where our motto with apologies to Descartes is Cognito Ergo Blago, I think, therefore I blog. And you can become a partner in the community by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot o RG and we might feature it on the blog. Now faster than a rescue greyhound. It’s in Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… When I was a kid the only support animal was a seeing eye dog, which was ALWAYS a German Shepherd. Dogs with Mounties were Huskies, dogs in the Alps were always St. Bernards’s, dogs with Timmy were Lassies, and a puppy in a teacup had to be a chihuahua. Times have changed. Support animals now include everything from parrots to pythons. Some poor emotional wrecks even tried to lug Shetland ponies onto airplanes, and use border collies to herd toddlers. The line between pets and support animals- and domestic partners as far as that goes- is erased more every day. Violating written and unwritten rules of behavior can get you canceled, and your pet rehomed to a loving forever home, or if your pet is old, sick, or boring, lovingly put down, just like Grandma if this coronavirus thing goes on much longer. We get support from every kind of pooch, from authenticated dog show winner to the mutt. Even from cats now, which we didn’t use to take seriously, unless they were purebred, so they ran around chasing birds, and quickly succumbed to weird cat diseases, cars, or coyotes. This was before the invention of kitty litter, which changed everything. Today dogs and cats share the pet throne, as measured by the Internet. Some animal activists reject use the word “pet,” find the pet and master relationship creepy. It’s all part of some neo-Marxist dialectical paradigm being pondered by a phd candidate even as I speak, his fuzzy cat Trotsky curled up in his lap. It is a fraught subject is all I am saying, akin to racism. It’s why we don’t see rampaging Zulus or Apaches in movies any more. As enemies, they were replaced by aliens, terrorist cults, and robots. And animals as pure entertainment are frowned upon- bullfights, rodeos. We don’t even have circuses, because the elephants made us sad, and what’s the point of a circus without elephants? We’re iconoclasting up a storm these days, knocking down statues of confederates, and even George Washington, cancel culturing men we once admired, shunning women who are way too Karen, willing to throw the very concept of man and woman off the bus, or under the bus, thrown on the ashbin of history with the horse and buggy, dial phones, and marxism itself which, ironically, gave us the dustbin of history in the first place. But we still have pets. We now live in the attention economy. And the coin of that realm is emojis. The cuter they get the more we click on ‘em. Exercise them, dote on them, feed them right, hug them, sleep with them. With pets, we don’t fight like cats and dogs. We lie down with them. Thanks to improved pet care, we don’t even get up with fleas! Cats and dogs are saving us. They offer no arguments, just whining and the occasional growl. In return, we’re probably saving them from extinction, at least until they stop being adorable. Sometimes our pets make a statement. We have little dog people, big dog people, French bulldogs, and little fierce yappers. We get big orange boy cat people, Siamese people, big flurfy cat people, hairless cat people. We get pit bulls. That scares the neighbors! Unless they have pit bulls, in which case, next stop Judge Judy! It’s a Darwinian smorgasbord, filtered through eugenics and half-remembered Disney movies. And now we have llamas, scorpions, tropical fish, lizards. Some prepper survivalists raise their own tilapia on their own fish farms. We could expand that to goldfish, guppies, and salamanders. Cows and chickens have been viewed with alarm by Vegans, and animal rights people, and merely people who believe in varying our diet. Make THEM pets, along with ducks and goats. Zebras and tigers and elephants could use a home away from the circus, the zoo, far from the slings and arrows and traps of poachers. We’ve already seen what happens to polar bears, Make them all pets, and so many arguments go away. The peaceable kingdom is the way to go. We become our own ark. Expand our homes to include enormous beasts of burden, also whales, as well as spider monkeys, bats, and hippos. Cats will keep down the mice. Dogs will keep the sheep herded. And we’ll have eggs til the cows come home, which is forever, because the cows are already home. Win win. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
The senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University. And from the partners at are online Community of Thinkers.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you to become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking

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