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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25272 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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Well, my view is that animals and humans are not equal moral agents.

However, animals are beings of their own. They have their own needs. Forcing an animal to act outside its nature is cruel, just as (say) beating a toddler for crying when they are hungry would be cruel. A dog is not meant to sit in one position or lie on a bed for hours. I don't know why the dog got up - hungry? needed to relieve itself? stiff from sitting? bored? - but shocking it for that is cruel.

And we don't have to introduce farmed humans, we just have to treat animals as creatures that, if we assume the authority over them of ownership, should be responsible ownership. I hate the modern notion of treating pets like quasi-humans, or living plushies, whose existence is to provide the owner with unconditional love on the owner's demand, and if this means locking a dog up for hours every day in an apartment while the owner goes to work, then so be it. Keeping cats indoors and never letting them out? So be it. The function of the animal is not to be a being in its own right, but an extension of the owner's needs. I hate that because, even if I don't think animals are the equivalent of a human as moral agents, a dog is a dog, not a living toy.

Piker's shocking his dog was obviously cruel and neglectful, but spoiling your pet is another, if less obvious, way of being cruel. C. S. Lewis from "The Four Loves":

This terrible need to be needed often finds its outlet in pampering an animal. To learn that someone is "fond of animals" tells us very little until we know in what way. For there are two ways. On the one hand the higher and domesticated animal is, so to speak, a "bridge" between us and the rest of nature. We all at times feel somewhat painfully our human isolation from the sub-human world--the atrophy of instinct which our intelligence entails, our excessive self-consciousness, the innumerable complexities of our situation, our inability to live in the present. If only we could shuffle it all off! We must not--and incidentally we can't--become beasts. But we can be with a beast. It is personal enough to give the word with a real meaning; yet it remains very largely an unconscious little bundle of biological impulses. It has three legs in nature's world and one in ours. It is a link, an ambassador. Who would not wish, as Bosanquet put it, "to have a representative at the court of Pan"? Man with dog closes a gap in the universe. But of course animals are often used in a worse fashion. If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain--you are too busy spoiling a dog's life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all. Also it is more like the real thing. To be sure, it's all very bad luck for the animal. But probably it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it. Better still, you would never know if it did. The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can't speak.

Those who say "The more I see of men the better I like dogs"--those who find in animals a relief from the demands of human companionship--will be well advised to examine their real reasons.

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