Are Pets Our Willing Slaves and Do We Have the Right to Own Them?
(This post was written entirely by a human without any help from AI)
When I was eleven years old, I had a dog named Morningstar. She was this sweet being. I found her in Albuquerque New Mexico sitting outside the corner store. My friends had dogs and I had never had one. Their dogs came with us everywhere on or off leash. This was back in the 1970s and people didn’t have a lot of rules about dogs.
My two girlfriends who had dogs suggested that this cute little dog sitting outside the store should be my dog. She had dark curly hair like mine. She was a small to medium sized 40-pound dog probably a poodle terrier mix. She wasn’t big and stately like Stieff and Vicky, the 2 majestic blond and white Samoyeds my friends had.
“That should be your dog.” Robyn, the older sister, said with confidence. Her dog Vicky looked over at the little dog with interest.
“No!” I said in shock “We can’t just take her. She must belong to someone.” We went into the store and when we came out, the adorable little dog was still sitting there looking at us with her tail wagging, mouth open and her eyes looking up at us all cute and beseeching.
“Nope” my friend Robyn said hiking up her patched jeans over her skinny hips, “she’s a stray.”
Her sister Wendy agreed, nodding her head. “You need a dog. Come on little dog.” she said, leading Steiff toward home. At first, I wasn’t sure. We had always moved around a lot, so I had never had a dog before. It just hadn’t ever occurred to me to want a pet dog. Though my best friend in Berkeley CA had a cocker spaniel named Prince. But that was different. Sheila had lived in the same house all her life.
So, it was decided. This cute delightful cheerful bouncy creature followed us three girls and the other two dogs back to my house. We fed the little black dog, and she came and went in and out of the open door and played in the sandy rocky back yard full of cacti. She slept on my bed with our cat from that day on. Robyn named her Morningstar after the incense brand they had at their little funky hippy cottage.
Morningstar was a mystery. She sometimes tricks spontaneously, standing up on her hind legs and walking or jumping high into the air. Somone had trained this dog to do all kinds of tricks that we didn’t even know how to elicite. We had no idea where she came from or what her original name was and she couldn’t tell us.
We were dirt poor. I was a “welfare brat”. We had moved 20 or 30 times and lived in 6 different states by the time we moved to New Mexico. We had just gotten back to the US from a trip to Hawaii, Japan, Hong Kong, and Thailand on the insurance money from my grandmother’s death. My mom said she was bored with California. “We haven’t lived in New Mexico yet.” She said. She loved the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, so we left all our stuff packed away in storage in Berkeley California, and off we went on the greyhound bus to stay with an acquaintance in Albuquerque New Mexico and look for a place to live.
After months in a two room shack next to the railroad tracks and the freeway, we found an old house without electricity that had to be wired from scratch. It had a big backyard and a dirt cellar we girls made into a playhouse.
This was the first time we had owned a home thanks to the HUD program for indigent families on welfare they had back in the 1970s.. The back door was always open in the summer because there was no air conditioning and NM was hot in the summer. Mom kept the bathtub filled with tepid water and all day she would dip in and out not even drying off, just throwing on her dress after a dip. Morningstar followed her around the house while I was off at school and then followed me around the rest of the time.
We would take the dogs to the park with us or the library or the store. They were rarely left behind. If it was an especially sweltering day, we left them locked in our houses with the fan running while we went on our adventures.
We didn’t know what a poop scooper was. The dogs just went out and pooped where they wanted to all over Albuquerque. There were no little green bags back in the seventies as far as I know. We just stepped over poop on the sidewalks and thought little about it.
We didn’t train the dogs. There was no internet, so we didn’t know anything about training animals and our moms didn’t give a shit about anything at all.
After another little stray terrier who had moved in briefly was hit by a car and killed, we started putting the dogs on leashes for walks. But that was about all the compensation we did to keep them safe. We were just thoughtless dumb little girls with thoughtless dumb single moms who knew nothing about keeping us or our pets safe. Amazingly everyone except Stuart Little the terrier, survived to adulthood!
We had a cat and this new dog, and they roamed in and out and didn’t run away. We fed them and they knew this was their home. They seemed fairly content.
But thinking back, it was cruel the way I treated the pets. I would smack the dog if she barked too much and just left her to fend for herself a lot of the time. I was just a stupid badly educated kid who didn’t know any better.
We never took the dog or cat to the vet so they both got pregnant once each and we had to get rid of the kittens and puppies. Our friend’s mom had drowned their kittens in the bathtub one time. We all just sort of coped the best we could. The pets never had heartworm shots and never even went anywhere near a vet the whole time we had them. Thankfully, they never got rabies.
Mom was mentally out to lunch scooting around in slippers and a nightgown most days composing music on an old out of tune piano with the dog at her feet. Our house looked like the Adams family lived there. Everyone else had yards with grass or at least pebbles or shrubs. All we had was tumbleweed. So, she didn’t really care or notice that we now had a dog.
What I realize now is that I treated the dog the way mom treated me. I was this good natured never-hurt-a-fly happy pleasant child. I adored my mom and thought she was the smartest person in the world. I did the laundry, cleaned the house, and got myself off to school in the morning with very little intervention. And the dog did the same; she just sort of existed and worshipped me and never complained.
The dog adored me. I fed her, brushed her, and bathed her now and then when I was in the mood, and she followed me everywhere. When we moved to Maine because New Mexico was now boring, I would go for long walks with the dog because now she was it for friends. But I was mean to the dog and ignored her and left her home when I didn’t feel like playing with her.
She got dragged to Maine when we moved the way I got dragged all over the country by my mom whenever she felt like moving. Mom stopped paying the mortgage on the New Mexico house and we lost it to the bank. I sort of wondered why she didn’t just rent it out. But only vaguely. Just like the dog I did whatever my mom wanted to do.
I had no say in anything as a kid and would not have dreamt of complaining about being torn away from friends or schools the way kids are depicted defying parents and speaking up about their feelings and needs in movies and tv show now a days.
The dog never spoke up or complained, of course. She just took everything as it came. When I left home the day after graduating from high school to get away from my insane depressed mom in that nasty tenement in Maine, I left the dog and cat behind. They had been loyal to me for 6 years and I didn’t give them a thought when they were not convenient.
Mom told me she gave the pets away to someone who lived on a farm when she got bored with Maine and moved back to live in Taos New Mexico.
Who knows what really happened to the animals? She probably took the pets to the animal shelter to be disposed of. I didn’t think to bring the dog or cat with me. I was seventeen and living with friends in another state. I was just trying to survive and didn’t give a single thought to the pets when I escaped the chaos that was my mom’s life.
Now as a grown-up, I can see how unfair it is that animals have to navigate human homes and the human world with no say in the matter. People like to pretend it is a “collaboration” between humans and animals. Because they get food for being our slaves. But collaboration takes consent. These animals are slaves. Yes. The dogs, cats, rabbits, horses and small rodents and reptiles we keep captive are slave animals.
Most pets are kept in houses and or yards and now that I pet sit in Silicon Valley, I see large dogs kept in tiny one-bedroom apartments and only taken out and walked 3 times a day. Some of these dogs get training to keep them from going insane in these restrictive environments. Some dogs have a yard to play in, and some have no place to go except on the end of a leash.
Most cats don’t even get walked. They just live in tiny houses going stir crazy. Yeah, but at least they are getting fed and getting affection now and then when humans are home. Right?
Wrong. Their lives are mostly meaningless and boring. Cats go stir crazy doing nothing but sleeping and eating most of the day and night. Pets are treated like furniture. It’s ridiculous and cruel that we think it’s so kind of us to keep animals in captivity. But really it only enriches our lives and not theirs.
We like being around animals, they are special wonderful souls. So, we keep them locked in our homes. This is our way of showing them how much we love them!
One client tells me how her dog just follows her around all day from room to room and naps while the human does her thing working at home, cooking, watching movies etc. They have a yard so at least the dog gets to go out when it wants, and they take it for those little 20-minute walks two or three times a day. But this dog isn’t really happy. She sighs and plays weird manipulative games whining and pretending to be in distress at night to get attention. Or having you open the door for her to go out into the yard or to come in and then standing there not coming in letting the cold air in or out.
She hides the ball if you throw it to her. She hoards things in her crate and growls if you try to take it from her. All these behaviors have to be and conditioned out so the dog can live with humans. There is a huge industry and dog training to make dogs docile and obedient to live in tiny unnatural spaces with humans.
What about dogs who live in the country and come and go the way Morningstar did in the city? That is preferable. A more symbiotic relationship where cats live outside in the barn and catch rodents and have some human contact is a little bit less creepy.
Humans mean well protecting their pets from coyotes and poisoning and automobiles. But what kind of existence is this really for the animal? Non-humans cannot understand the rules and reasons or purposes for any of the junk we have inside the houses. It is a meaningless maze that they have to live in without any choice of their own.
But we need to ease out of owning other living beings. Yes of course, we should take care of the remaining animals from factory farms and animal shelters, but we don’t do any more domestication of animals. We should close the factory farms and let the animals live out the rest of their lives. We should keep the remaining pets we have comfortable but stop breeding more animal slaves. Let this be the last generation.
We can look at animals from afar without destroying their lives and habitats. As humans who care deeply about animals it’s our job to stay on the path and take pictures or look at animals through our binoculars but stop touching them, breeding them, riding them, training them to do tricks for our entertainment and just stop interfering with their lives. Respect animals. Don’t entrap them, eat them, or breed them into strange shapes that are pleasing to the human eye.
Is there an alternative to giving up having pets in human societies?
Now that you asked, Yes! There are examples of animals and humans in equal coexistence around the world though it is rare. Istanbul Turkey is one city where cats are not owned by individual humans, but laws have been provided to protect these semi-wild animals. People respect their autonomy and feed them. The humans are rewarded with cats who allow them to pet them and snuggle them without humans owning or controlling their ehereabouts, bodies or reproductive choices. Cats that are indoor outdoor animals are known to have shorter lives because of traffic, and other problems like hunting rodents that have been fed rat poison. But in Constantinople Cats are allowed to be the controllers of the rodent population. And They are choosing to come into a human environment and live with the threat of traffic. And there are laws to protect cats from harm.
Ideally we should allow wild animals to hunt thier own food away from human areas and not feed them. But with so much habitat being destroyed by humans many animals have had to adapt to an urban lifestyle. As humans learn to stopsupporting the factory farm system millions of acres of land will be freed up and wild habitat will flourish again. But in the mean time equal cohabitation with urban animals might be a way for humans to get some of the animal contact we crave so desperately without too much intrusion into thier rights as beings.
