Abstract
This paper outlines the moral contours of human relationships with companion animals. The paper details three sources of duties to and regarding companion animals: (1) from the animal’s status as property, (2) from the animal’s position in relationships of care, love, and dependency, and (3) from the animal’s status as a sentient being with a good of its own. These three sources of duties supplement one another and not only differentiate relationships with companion animals from wild animals and other categories of domestic animals such as livestock, but they also overlap to provide moral agents with additional reasons for preventing and avoiding harm to companion animals. The paper concludes that not only do owners and bystanders have direct and indirect duties to protect companion animals from harm, but also that these duties have the potential, in some circumstances, to clash with duties owed to the state and fellow citizens.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Whilst it may be that relationship of care, love and dependency are formed between farmers and their livestock, or scientists and their laboratory subjects, the very nature of those relationships and the need to maintain a degree of separation will tend to make them less strongly held in both qualitative and quantitative terms than relationships between owners and companion animals.
Hanrahan’s contention is that the trivial interests of owners take precedence over all of the interests of a companion animal save, perhaps, its interest in ‘a good death’ (Hanrahan 2007, p. 395).
Even the language used to describe the killing of companion animals owes more to the animal’s status as property than as a living being—‘destruction’ is often used in place of killing.
A further reason for perhaps focusing on these species is they represent the most common and historically ubiquitous form of pet ownership and thus have particular relevance to contemporary social practice: for example, there are around ten million dogs kept as companion animals in the UK and they are the commonest species of companion animal (RSPCA 2010, p. 66).
There is a broader point to be made here about how thinking about animals which are not pets as commodities impacts on our moral motivation toward them—making their destruction and consumption seem less important.
Sadly, this example is of the kind that happens in reality on a far too regular basis. In the UK causing undue suffering to animals in this way carries a hefty fine and/or 6 month prison sentence.
For example, feral dogs in highly urbanised and industrialised countries of the first world often struggle to survive. Where feral dogs survive and flourish in any numbers it is because they have access to ready sources of food such as exposed garbage dumps and slum conditions found more commonly in less developed countries (WSD 2008). Some research into American feral dogs indicated a 45–50% mortality within 8 months of birth (Beck 2002, pp. 36–44) due to disease. Mortality rates amongst feral dogs are high and life expectancy low (Beck 2002, p. 39).
Indeed pet ownership is often spoken of in terms of adoptions—think of campaigns by animal rescue charities entreating us to ‘adopt a pet’, or of wildlife organisation and zoos offering animal adoption schemes.
And intervening could mean as little as contacting the police.
My argument is not so much that treating non-human animals as a means to an end is wrong per se, but that doing so in ways which treat them as nothing more than this and that do not take account of the animal’s interest is wrong.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out to me that whilst it is generally the case that companion animals are given higher status or standing than wild animals, from an ecological perspective the reverse may be true (and indeed in legal terms where endangered species are concerned). In these terms, a creature’s value is dependent upon its place in a holistic system. Thus it is that Baird Callicot assesses the value of non-human animals (and indeed plants) based upon their importance to the integrity, beauty, and stability of a biotic community. Callicot writes of companion animals: 'Wild animals and native plants have a particular place in nature, according to the land ethic, which domestic animals (because they are products of human art and represent an extended presence of human beings in the natural world) do not’ (Callicott 1989). However, the point stands that an animal’s place in a relationship, or status as property, are not the end of the matter in determining how we ought to treat them.
One possible response, following from Kant (see Kant 2004, pp. 126–127) is to say that duties to intervene to prevent cruel treatment are indirect duties to other humans because the cruel treatment of animals hardens the heart and makes people more likely to be cruel to other humans. This argument is vulnerable to the counterfactual that if cruelty could be proven to make men less cruel to each other (perhaps being cruel to non-human animals helps to vent negative emotions) then it should be encouraged—and this is extremely counter-intuitive. It could also be argued on virtue-theoretical grounds that cruelty is objectionable without recourse to any argument about the moral standing of victims or likely impact on other persons, nevertheless, I suspect that even the virtue-theorist would agree that cruel acts carried out upon a sentient being are worse than those carried out, for example, on a stuffed toy in the mistaken belief that it is sentient.
They may even be the property of a non-person such as a young child or a legal entity such as a company or trust.
What counts as excessive will be a matter of context and so I shall not specify exactly what that is here. For example, whether intervening to save a drowning companion animal is an excessive burden could depend, among other things, upon how strong a swimmer a person is.
Good cause might be when the companion animal is suffering terribly and only euthanasia will end that suffering.
In England the Dangerous Dogs Act grants the courts powers to order the 'destruction' of any dog judged dangerous including certain breeds and those which have injured humans.
References
Archard, David. 1993. Do parents own their children? The International Journal of Children’s Rights 1: 293–301.
Bearup, Brooke J. 2007. Pets: Property and the paradigm of protection. Journal of Animal Law 3: 173–191.
Beck, Alan M. 2002. The ecology of stray dogs: a study of free-ranging urban animals. West Lafayette: NotaBell Books.
Britton, Ann Hartwell. 2006. Bones of contention: Custody of family pets. Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers 20: 1–38.
Callicott, J.Baird. 1989. In defense of the land ethic: Essays in environmental philosophy. New York: Suny Press.
Cochrane, Alasdair. 2009. Ownership and justice for animals. Utilitas 21: 424–442.
Favre, David. 2000. Equitable self-ownership for animals. Duke Law Journal 50: 473–502.
Francione, Gary L. 1996. Animals as property. Animal Law 2: i–vi.
Gomez, Samantha. 2005. Custody of pets, http://www.osullivandavies.com.au/article.asp?id=8844. Accessed 18 May 2011.
Hanrahan, Rebecca. 2007. Dog duty. Society and Animals 15: 379–399.
Hill, Thomas E. 1980. Humanity as an end in itself. Ethics 91: 84–99.
Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb. 1917. Fundamental legal conceptions as applied in judicial reasoning. The Yale Law Journal 26: 710–770.
Kant, Immanuel. [1780–1781] 2004. Duties to animals are indirect. In Animal rights: a historical anthology, eds. Andrew Linzey and Paul Clark, 126–127. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kelch, Thomas G. 1998. Toward a non-property status for animals. New York University Environmental Law Journal 6: 531.
Kittay, Eva. 2008. At the margins of moral personhood. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 5: 137–156.
Kraut, Richard. 2007. Desire and the human good. In Ethical theory: An anthology, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau, 315–324. Oxford: Blackwell.
Locke, John. [1690] 2003. Two treatises of government and a letter concerning toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Milligan, T. 2010. Beyond animal rights: Food, pets and ethics. London: Continuum.
Oh, Minjoo, and Jeffrey Jackson. 2011. Animal rights versus cultural rights: exploring the dog meat debate in South Korea from a world polity perspective. Journal of Intercultural Studies 32: 31–56.
Raz, Joseph. 1989. Liberating Duties. Law and Philosophy 8: 3–21.
Regan, Tom. 2004. The case for animal rights, 2nd ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
RSPCA. 2010. Measuring animal welfare in the UK 2005–2009. Horsham: The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Scanlon, Thomas M. 1998. What we owe to each other. Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Singer, Peter. 1977. Animal liberation: Towards an end to man’s inhumanity to animals. London: Granada Publishing.
Steiner, Hillel. 2008. Universal self-ownership and the fruits of one’s labour: a reply to Curchin. Journal of Political Philosophy 16: 350–355.
Steiner, Hillel. 2002. Silver spoons and golden genes: Talent differentials and distributive justice. In The moral and political status of children, eds. David Archard and Colin M. Macleod, 183–95. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Welfare of Stray Dogs. 2008. Welfare of Stray Dogs: FAQs. The welfare of stray dogs, http://www.wsdindia.org/faqs.htm. Accessed 3 May 2011.
Wenar, Leif. 1997. The concept of property and the takings clause. Columbia Law Review 97: 1923–1946.
Wise, Steven. 2004. Animal rights, one step at a time. In Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, eds. Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum, 19–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Wolf, Susan. 1992. Morality and partiality. Philosophical Perspectives 6: 243–259.
Yeates, James, and D.C.J. Main. 2011. Veterinary opinions on refusing euthanasia: justifications and philosophical frameworks. Veterinary Record 168: 263.
Yeates, James. 2010. Ethical aspects of euthanasia of owned animals. In Practice 32: 70–73.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to two anonymous reviewers for a number of very helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cooke, S. Duties to Companion Animals. Res Publica 17, 261–274 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9159-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9159-x