An Animal Rights Perspective on Living with Dogs & Cats
I am pleased to announce that Welcome Home, our new book, is now available on Amazon by clicking here.
For the vast majority of people, the bond they share with their dog or cat companion is a familial one, born of love and mutual affection. Indeed, interspecies relationships in the world are not rare and they are relationships that humans generally celebrate as evidence of the interconnectedness and beauty of life on Earth. But according to some of the loudest voices in the American animal rights movement today, such relationships are incompatible with the rights of animals when one of the parties is a human being. Living with dogs and cats is, according to this view, a “necessary evil” at best; at worst, it is a relationship between “master” and “slave” and those animals would be better off if they did not exist at all.
With the belief that the “solution” to all dog and cat suffering lies in their eventual extinction, the contemporary animal rights movement not only preaches that the lives of dogs and cats are dispensable, their deliberate elimination of no moral consequence, their disappearance from our planet no tragedy to mourn, it embraces an agenda to which no other rights-based movement in history has ever subscribed: the deliberate annihilation of those it has pledged to protect.
Welcome Home explores the dangers to animals posed by this misanthropic, pro-extinction position, challenging the logical fallacies, factual inaccuracies, and ethical compromises upon which it is based, including the campaign of animal extermination by the nation’s largest and most influential animal “rights” group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Though it is publicly perceived as an organization which seeks to expand the rights of animals, PETA employees commit daily violence against them, killing thousands every year, rounding up animals to put them to death, defending abusive pounds, fighting shelter reform legislation, and encouraging shelters to kill even more. And the motivation for these atrocities is at the heart of the very philosophy condemned in our book: that dogs and cats should not exist.
In its place, Welcome Home offers an alternative animal rights philosophy, an optimistic approach which champions the rights of dogs and cats to the many emotional, physical, and evolutionary advantages conferred by their cohabitation with humans, as well as, and most important of all, the right to their very existence.
Of course, there is no denying that, as a society, we can do better by dogs and cats. Of course, there is much work to do to reduce their needless suffering. But in seeking to bring those harms to an end, we can and should maintain a respect for the inherent right of animals to their very existence. This is, in the end, our most fundamental duty to them. Moreover, suggesting that the dogs contentedly sleeping on our sofas and the cats stretched out on our beds don’t belong there and that our love for them is inherently exploitative are positions born of misanthropy, one that is blind to all the benefits human bestow upon dogs and cats, our proven potential for ongoing improvement, and our remarkable capacity for love.
To purchase, click here.
(An e-book version will be released next month.)
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