I’ve Been An Animal Lover My Whole Life-But I’m Not Sure I’ll Own Pets Again

Getting to grips with the ethics of ‘owning’ animals

It’s funny how things work out. I’d had an idea for an article for months — one about how I feel less and less comfortable with dog ownership. I wasn’t sure how well received or read it would be so I put it on the back-burner, until Promptly Written’s February theme popped up, asking writers to examine the exact questions I’ve had in my head for a while now.

The older I get, the more I question things we are just supposed to accept as normal. Pet ownership is one of them.

When I was a child, I was obsessed with animals. Especially dogs. I begged and begged every Christmas and birthday for a dog and my dad would always say no. I was thrilled when he gave in and let us have a cat but that excitement was short-lived because she hated everyone. Not long after that my mum managed to convince him to let us have a guinea pig each. I was besotted — finally, my own pet! I loved that little fellow intensely and I was genuinely devastated when he passed away years later.

When my mum and dad split up, my mum indulged us and we got our first dog, quickly followed by another, and then another. The pets kept piling up as the waifs and strays were never turned away. At one point in my teen years, we had four dogs, five cats, three guinea pigs, a gerbil, stick insects, goldfish and thirty plus rabbits. Yes, it’s true what they say about rabbits…

Years later, with my own family, the obsession with owning pets continued. I currently own three dogs, but at one point, I was fostering them as well, so there would often be up to six dogs in the house, plus chickens, ducks, guinea pigs and rabbits outside and hamsters and gerbils inside. I loved it. It was a lot of work but I always felt happy and relaxed around my animals. I’ve always preferred them to people.

In recent years, due to increased work hours, the children growing up, and the fact we are trying to downsize our lives to move areas in a year or so, the menagerie has shrunk. I’ve still got the three dogs, but outside there are just two hens and one cockerel. That’s it. As the rest passed away one by one, they were not replaced

And I know that I will never replace any of them. I will never own a rabbit, guinea pig, gerbil or hamster ever again. There is part of me that thinks it would be kinder never to own a dog again… but I don’t know how I would cope without one. Dogs are different, but I’ll come to that in a bit.

Pet ownership is problematic, let’s be honest. All too often it comes about due to parents giving in to children’s demands. You see this all the time in our local pet store, where over-bred rabbits and guinea pigs wait to be sold to families who will soon bore of them. Not everyone is a terrible small animal owner, of course, but the pet shops don’t help — selling cages, runs, hutches and tanks that are far too small and incredibly boring.

Rabbits do not make good pets. Think about the life of a wild rabbit and compare it to a pet one, and most set-ups will fall far from the mark. In the wild they can run, dig, burrow and create intricate tunnels and chambers underground. As pets, they are often left in boring hutches and forgotten about. If they’re lucky they might get a wire run moved around the lawn and perhaps some cardboard tunnels and other enrichment items, but it’s still got to be boring. As prey animals, small pets don’t really like being handled. It goes against their instincts, so unless you handle them regularly and gently and make it fun for them, chances are they will scrabble, scratch, bite and kick.

Although I’ve owned them myself, I now feel very uneasy about people buying animals like rabbits and guinea pigs as pets. I think its selfish. You want one, so you get one. You buy all the gear for it, feed it and expect it to be grateful and happy. It has no choice in the matter, whatsoever. It did not choose you and it cannot tell you how it feels about the life you offer it.

With cats and dogs things are less problematic, but also more so. I don’t think many cat owners consider enrichment for cats, although this is becoming more of a trend now with considerate dog owners. Lucky cats are let outside to explore, climb, hunt and kill as nature intended. (Not so great for the wild bird population.) Unlucky cats get hit by cars. Unluckier cats stay indoors their whole life and in some countries are declawed so they don’t ruin the furniture. Appalling.

Think about what we do to dogs and cats. We control every aspect of their life. We decide what they eat and how often, whether they get exercise and how much and what kind, who they can be friends with, whether they get praised or punished, whether they get trained or not and how, whether they get cuddled or picked up, whether they can have babies or not, and in the end, we often decide when and how they will die.

It is a huge responsibility. I would argue it’s an even bigger one than parenthood — at some point kids grow up, leave and live their own lives. If you buy a pet, it’s with you until it dies and is your sole responsibility that entire time because it has no agency over its own life. It’s captive.

I think I am a good dog owner and I am lucky to have a fantastic dog trainer who uses positive methods only. Dogs absolutely thrive under her guidance, no matter what the behavioural issue is. No yanking, alpha-rolling, kicking or pinning, or choking is ever used. At training classes, everything is fun. The dogs are encouraged with positive reinforcement and allowed to take things at their own pace.

Kindness is key.

Also, seeing the world from their eyes. So many owners are unable to do this. The dog does something that annoys or embarrasses them so it gets punished. That does not solve the problem, it just weakens trust between you and does not examine the reason behind the dogs behaviour in the first place.

But I don’t want to get side-tracked by different dog training techniques.

Let’s think for a moment about what we do to dogs and what we expect from them. You can apply this to other pets too.

We buy them, we choose them, they do not choose us. We take them away from their family and insert them into an alien environment. We start training them, which really means making sure they fit into the human environment where jumping up, stealing food, eating shoes and pooping indoors are all frowned at. They eventually learn all this, just to please us, just to stay on our good side. Then we take them out in public. We put collars and leads around their necks, we yank them about, we make them sit at the road-side, even though we don’t, we put choke collars and prong collars and slip-leads on them if they pull, even though it’s our fault we didn’t teach them loose-lead walking….

We expect them to be fine with everything. Cars, motorbikes, cyclists, joggers, children, cats, livestock, other dogs… The list goes on. Done right, with gentleness, socialisation at an early age can help them get used to all these things but all too often dogs are thrown in at the deep end and expected to just deal with it.

And when they don’t? When they cower, run away, pull on the lead, bark, lunge, growl or snap? Well, we don’t like that, do we? Their behaviour is now a reflection on us and they’ve let us down… Never mind the fact that billions of reasons could be causing the behaviour, not least genetics, breed traits and behaviour learnt from their parents…

What else do we do to them? We leave them at home all day. We get a dog and think we can still have a full-time job! We expect them to love children and all strangers… I mean, really? I don’t even like most people, why on earth should I expect better reasoning and coping skills from my dog??

Again, lucky dogs will have a kind and gentle owner, one that tries to see the world through the dog’s eyes in order to understand its behaviour. Lucky dogs get walked twice a day, let off lead to run and explore, lucky dogs are allowed to sniff…. Oh my, I see so many poor dogs being yanked on the lead for daring to sniff something… Don’t people realise they interpret the world through their noses and they also use sniffing to calm themselves down?

Lucky dogs do activities such as agility, hoopers and tricks — not to win medals for their owners, but to have fun, get fit and gain confidence.

Unlucky dogs… well, it never ceases to amaze me how terribly cruel people can be to man’s best friend.

And what do we do to them? We shock them, yank them, hurt them, starve them, bully them, confuse them, experiment on them, kill them, eat them, abuse them, race them, abandon them, breed them into weird and uncomfortable shapes and sizes and don’t seem to care about the health problems this causes them, we cut off their ears and tails for no reason… and at the very least, we offer them very boring lives.

And what do dogs do for us in return?

They give unwavering loyalty, unconditional love. They want to please us; they just don’t always understand how. They work for the police, they sniff out drugs, guns and bombs, they find lost people, they rescue people from drowning, they alert people to the possibility of a seizure, they can sniff out cancer, they can track people, they pull sleds, they guard livestock… the list goes on. Dogs are amazing.

And we do not deserve them.

I often feel guilty when I look at my dogs. I deliberately chose a laid-back lazy breed, the lurcher, so I know that after their morning walk they will all sleep soundly while I’m working. That wouldn’t happen with a more energetic breed. I take them to training when I can — hoopers, agility, tricks and scent-work. I let them off the lead as much as possible, usually once a day so they can run. I socialise them as best they can, but not too much, because one of them finds it really hard. I see the world through her eyes and try to judge daily what activity or walk will suit her and help her. I mostly work from home, so I am with them a lot. I take them to new places. I let them sniff. I do treasure hunts around the house where they have to find all the treats. I have snuffle mats and liki-mats and treat dispensers and endless enrichment activities for them.

I still feel guilty.

I still feel uneasy.

Their lives are in my hands. I own them. Does that make them slaves? And I could always do more but there just isn’t time in a busy modern life.

I hate collars now so only use harnesses. I would not like to be dragged around by my neck either. But sometimes it feels really weird if I think about it too much. I choose when and where we walk. I decide everything. I do my best because I truly love them and want the best for them, but they had no choice in any of this. And they never get to leave home like kids and do things their own way, do they?

Going back to other pets and animal care in general, I just feel sad. We do so many awful things to animals. We hunt them for fun, we experiment on them, lock them up, eat them, cause them terror and pain, we race them to make money for us. In short, we use them for our own gains, again and again.

Pet ownership is also problematic from an environmental point of view. I’m a vegetarian as I’m not comfortable with the lives farm animals often lead. Again, if I think about it too much, it just feels wrong. But yet my dogs eat meat. Other animals have to die so that I can feed my dogs, so that I can own dogs…

Is that right?

I won’t ever own small pets again. I have no interest in locking an animal up in an environment that is often too small and boring, just so that I can feed it and look at it. I won’t ever own ducks and chickens again.

Dogs… It’s harder. If I think I can give them the best life ever, the life they would choose if they could, then I’d like to think dogs are in my future. But in all honesty, I would like to see levels of pet ownership falling. I would like to see education in schools about animal care. I would like humans to remember that we are animals too and just because we can talk and drive cars and have control of the world, does not mean we have more right to be here. It does not mean we can treat other animals cruelly.

We should advocate for them. We should do our research and that means not just blindly following the latest tough guy on social media promising to ‘fix’ your dog in five seconds with unscientific, bully-boy tactics. It means we should learn about an animal before we decide to own it and be responsible for it. Can we give it the biggest cage or enclosure possible? Are we going to be there for it? Are we going to provide enrichment activities that try to emulate the life it would have had as a wild animal? We should see things from their perspective. They are wholly innocent, incapable of malice. We choose to have them, they do not choose us. It is a privilege, not a right. It is a huge responsibility to hold another creature’s life in your hands.

And if we cannot provide the best life possible, we simply should not have them.

I’d like to end by mentioning two books I read recently that really forced me to think long and hard about the way we treat animals. Tender Is The Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica is a book set in a society where people can no longer eat animals. The animals all have a virus that is deadly to people. Instead of embracing veganism, the people find a way to justify eating each other. It is horrific and one of the most disturbing books I have ever read… yet, if you eat meat, you should probably read it. Everything that happens to the human ‘stock’ in this book happens to animals every day, yet we think it’s fine. Just like animals, the human stock in this book cannot talk as their tongues have been removed. I’ve always thought that people would be kinder to animals if they could talk like us.

The other one is Now We Are Animals by R.P Nathan. In this book, an alien race have taken over earth and colonised us. They see us as animals and they look at the way we treat other animals, and do the exact same thing to us. They think humans are beasts, inferior to them. They eat them, race them, experiment on them and keep them as pets… Honestly, if you’re considering pet ownership, maybe read this first.

As for the animals I still have in my life, I will continue to do the best for them. I owe them that and much more. But pet ownership does not sit as easily with me as it once did.

Thank you for reading and thank you to Promptly Written for the February theme: ‘pets, or the human and animal relationship’.

The Day The Earth Turned (3 book series) Kindle edition (amazon.co.uk)