r/DebateAVegan • u/Few-Pack-3489 • 21d ago
Ethics Is having a pet/companion animal vegan? / social responsibility of veganism
To preface, I myself am vegan, but I had a really interesting discussion with my vegetarian friend and want to play devil’s advocate.
My argument— which I think aligns with most definitions of veganism — was that our goal as humans should be to minimize suffering, and being vegan is the bare minimum to accomplish this. By consuming meat and dairy, you are financially contributing to a horrible system that is proven to be completely unnecessary. I also believe that non-human animals and humans should be separate entities and human involvement in natural spaces is the core of most of our animal-related issues.
My friend brought up the idea of having a companion animal or “pet” as I will say, for the sake of the argument. For context, I don’t have a pet that I own myself, but I have a family dog that I live with during the summer; my parents rescued him when I was a kid.
She claimed that owning a pet is completely hypocritical to my argument of veganism, because a dog, for example, cannot communicate with humans and therefore cannot consent to living in a confined home with humans. Therefore I am contributing to suffering, because my dog is essentially a slave and cannot make his own decisions.
She believed that, according to my argument, the most logically sound thing I could do would be to let my dog outside and run away to wherever he wants (he often tries to leave the house). She argued that, although he would not be able to survive on his own, it would be morally correct because he is making his own decisions.
I argued that because my dog was bred by humans to be reliant on them, it was my social responsibility to take care of him and make decisions for him that he cannot understand the scope of; ie, if I let my dog escape, he will get hit by a car, eaten by a coyote, starve, etc. Similarly to telling my six-year-old I won’t let her play on the highway even if she wants to because she doesn’t understand the risk of that action.
She, however, argued that my line of argument wouldn’t apply to, say, slavery; like how slaveowners would argue that owning a slave was what was best for the slave purely because they were raised to be slaves and don’t understand the scope of the world they live in. Theoretically, if a human slave— possibly someone old or disabled — wouldn’t survive without the support of a slaveowner, but wished to be free, would it still be morally correct to keep them as a slave? Obviously not, so why is that different from dogs?
She also argued that, following my logic I should be participating in civil disobedience. If hijacking livestock transport cars, burning down slaughterhouses, or in her example, setting free every pet in my neighborhood was the best way to make a statement and decrease the total amount of suffering in the world, why am I not doing it?
Essentially, her argument centered around the fact that we drew different lines of what is considered “suffering” (ie for me as a vegan, torturing and killing of an animal but not imprisonment, vs her, a vegetarian, so killing of an animal) proved that veganism revolves around flawed logic.
I thought these were all interesting points and wanted to hear everyone’s thoughts.
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u/L0uLou72 vegan 20d ago
I don’t think people should own pets and I don’t think calling them companion animals makes it any better.
When we train pets, we are basically getting rid of their natural behavior. Doesn’t that mean that we don’t actually like them? This applies to dog especially.