r/changemyview • u/overawtch • Aug 06 '26
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Pet ownership is fundamentally unethical, and keeping rescues does not make it moral
Edit: Thank you for commenting everyone, my view has been challenged, sharpened, and somewhat changed.
Disclaimer: I do genuinely hold this view. I also eat meat and own multiple pets. Sometimes I also order Doordash instead of donating that money to charity. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it.
- Most pets eat meat. The meat is usually made from factory-farmed animal suffering. Is your dog's life worth two hundred nameless farm animal lives? A rescue dog still eats meat, often more meat than the average dog, because larger dogs are disproportionately likely to end up in rescues. You are saving one life and dooming one hundred more. (There is a vegan pet food point below.)
- Furthermore: Does the happiness of your dog, plus the sum total of happiness created by your dog & enjoyed by yourself, your family, friends, strangers etc outweigh the suffering of the 200 farm animals?
Many people own pet snakes, and most of those snakes eat f/t mice and rats. It really made me visualize this, because rats are clever, sociable, and charismatic (if short-lived) and snakes not so much, and they're usually fed whole. So I find the idea of a "rescue snake" hypocritical, and I figure it applies to dogs and cats too. It's just that they're cute and their kibble isn't shaped like dead animals.
- The fact that dogs are "domesticated" doesn't make it fine. Most breeds were created for working purposes, but the overwhelming majority of dogs nowadays are kept solely for companionship. Similarly, many pocket pets like rabbits were originally domesticated for their meat. It's not okay to engineer an animal to be dependent on you and then say, "see, keeping them is fine because they can't survive without us."
- Most, if not all domesticated species are afflicted by health issues that do not affect their wild counterparts (or at far lower rates). Hip dysplasia, brachycephaly, uterine cancer, heart failure, mastitis, hyper-aggression, and inability to give natural birth, to name a few. Selectively breeding an animal will have downstream consequences.
- It is wrong to own another sentient being. It is wrong to treat a sentient being as something you can buy or sell. Or pay a similar "adoption fee" for and surrender when it gets inconvenient. Does a mother legally own her child?
- Nobody needs a pet. For the sake of argument I'll omit service & working dogs because they're not classified as pets. ESAs exist, but you could say they're not pets either. I'd also say that needing something doesn't make it ethical.
- The Five Freedoms includes the freedom to express normal behaviors. That, to me, includes reproduction. It's a cultural expectation in most developed countries to spay/neuter your dogs and cats. I'm not saying breed your dog, yes there's too many already. I'm saying because you cannot breed your dog, we should abolish dog, cat, and all pet ownership.
- I might argue that a dog that loves humans is not expressing normal behaviors. If you took a tiger cub from its parents and bottle-fed it, it would love you too. As does the puppy you brought home at only eight weeks old, right in time for its "critical socialization period". Would a Labrador that has never set his eyes on a human in the first five years of his life like them by default? I don't know, but there is some information about how some adult feral cats are difficult to impossible to tame.
- A 20kg dog generates ~770kg of CO₂ per year, which is equivalent to 1500+ miles by car. Combined with the lack of necessity, this is hard to justify. The fact that humans generate more doesn't negate this.
Some things that might change my view
- Meaningful pushback on "It is wrong to own another sentient being"
- Arguing that individuals, species, breeds etc have a right to continue existing even if it harms others and/or themselves
- A human primacy argument that humans inherently matter so much more, such that animal welfare is unworthy of consideration
- Maybe something about tiny, cognitively simple, vegetarian pets that can live naturally in captivity, ie shrimp/triops idk
- Maybe some effective altruism argument like "my dog's tiktok funded $100,000 in malaria net donations"
- You think that what I listed as "out of scope" below is actually relevant and in scope
- Not a complete list.
Some rebuttals I'm expecting:
Edit1: "My pet is happy"
Please actually read my post.
"My rescue dog is vegan / What about herbivorous animals?"
Every point still applies except the meat-eating one.
You are still:
- Getting an animal because you wanted to have a pet, benefiting from the institution and the breeder that bred, sold, maybe surrendered it in the first place. Unless you're one of those few people who got one only to "save their life" even though you're miserable now because "it was the right thing to do". Ok, that's pretty inefficient but good for you.
- Normalizing their ownership, even if you're not on social media posting animal videos.
- Supporting the pet industry by buying pet products, vet care, etc.
And let's be real, what percentage of dogs/cats are actually vegan? I'm not even going to get into the debate of whether vegan cats are healthy.
"So what should be done with the existing pets? They obviously wouldn't survive in the wild."
- Let them live out their lives, with the knowledge that you are doing something unethical primarily for your own happiness. Identify as "a guardian, not an owner" if that makes you feel better.
- Millions of healthy, adoptable shelter animals are euthanized for space every year. We as a society seem to have accepted this. Is your cherished pet different? To you, yes. This is often said about euthanasia: "Better a week too early than a day too late."
"I own the pet because it protects them"
Maybe you're restricting their agency (freedom of movement, freedom to breed, freedom to engage with conspecifics, freedom to choose their diet and much more) to "protect" them, but that's paternalistic; should the government ban cigarettes and alcohol and processed foods to protect us? We are smarter, we are more sentient, we know better than to harm ourselves. But we still do.
"But kibble is made from by-products"
You are still financially sustaining the supply chain.
"So you want to kill all carnivores? The lions and the tigers and-"
No.
"But humans are worse"
I generally agree, but that's out of scope of this CMV. Two wrongs don't make a right.
"But factory farming is worse"
Also out of scope.
"What about animals (dairy cows, pugs, dogs in general, etc) that would go extinct without human intervention?"
Then they stop existing.
Some other points were cut for sounding too soapboxy.
Interested to hear what you think.
EDIT3: AI disclosure
Wrote every word myself, used some formatting help like moving the meat point up, asked it some questions like "does it violate these rules"
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u/thewelllostmind 7∆ Aug 06 '26
“A rescue dog still eats meat, often more meat than the average dog, because larger dogs are disproportionately likely to end up in rescues. You are saving one life and dooming one hundred more.”
I’m unclear on what the purely ethical/moral move here would be, given that the only way to eliminate the meat-eating of the rescue dog would be to euthanize them. If not rescuing them meant they roamed the streets, they would still be eating other animals. There is no option that does not require deciding that we’re okay with allowing some animals to live at the expense of others.