The recent popularity of "designer" dogs, cats, micro-pigs and other pets may seem to suggest that pet keeping is no more than a fad. Indeed, it is often assumed that pets are a Western affectation, a weird relic of the working animals kept by communities of the past.
About half of the households in Britain alone include some kind of pet; roughly 10m of those are dogs while cats make up another 10m. Pets cost time and money, and nowadays bring little in the way of material benefits. But during the 2008 financial crisis, spending on pets remained almost unaffected, which suggests that for most owners pets are not a luxury but an integral and deeply loved part of the family.
Some people are into pets, however, while others simply aren't interested. Why is this the case? It is highly probable that our desire for the company of animals actually goes back tens of thousands of years and has played an important part in our evolution. If so, then genetics might help explain why a love of animals is something some people just don't get.
[...] The pet-keeping habit often runs in families: this was once ascribed to children coming to imitate their parents' lifestyles when they leave home, but recent research has suggested that it also has a genetic basis. Some people, whatever their upbringing, seem predisposed to seek out the company of animals, others less so.
Is the desire to keep pets really hard-wired in our DNA?
(Score: 4, Informative) by aristarchus on Sunday October 01 2017, @09:10PM (3 children)
Peter Singer [petersinger.info] calls this "speciesism", the belief that your species is somehow "better" than others.
Except most "animal rights" theories are based not on a notion of desert, something belonging to an individual animal, but instead on the principle that suffering is a malum in se, or just plain wrong, and therefore is to eliminated or minimized. The Jain and Buddhist doctrine of ahimsa is the same thing, which is good, since Buddhists in any case do not believe in souls, even animal souls.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday October 01 2017, @09:47PM (2 children)
Thanks aristarchus. I had a feeling the ability to experience pleasure or suffering was key here and the reduction of suffering does seem to be the goal of most rights. According to utilitarianism, a right should apply to all species that benefit from it via reduced suffering or increased pleasure, provided that application does not increase suffering or reduce pleasure by a greater amount for another species.
Someone might make a case that increased intelligence increases the capacity for suffering due to reflection on the suffering causing further mental anguish. The principle you raise that all suffering is to be minimized renders that irrelevant, except when weighing the suffering of one or more individuals against those of another.
Consumerism is poison.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Sunday October 01 2017, @10:57PM (1 child)
Yep, this is where the khallows of the world will get their panties all in a bunch. Utilitarianism has no intrinsic problem with allowing the suffering of some, as long as it produces more happiness for a greater number of others. In other words, it would be moral to sacrifice a minority for the benefit of the majority. Ursula K. LeGuin's short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas [utilitarianism.com], poses this problem rather starkly, by adding the requirement that those who benefit have to acknowledge that they do so on the suffering of others.
But the entire discussion brings up the more "wholistic" side of "animal rights", things like "Deep Ecology" [deepecology.org]. In Deep Ecology, rights belong to an ecosystem, which has, I guess, a right to viability and even flourishing by the simple fact that it exists. If individual animals, or populations of animals, threaten to upset the balance of an ecosystem, they have no rights and can be dealt with to restore the system as a whole. These kinds of debates come up all the time when there is talk of culling deer herds due to overpopulation, to avoid a starvation die off and the increased damage to the ecosystem as a whole. Animal rights people sometimes seem to think that deer, individual deer, have a right not to be killed. Some may think that this is misplaced anthropomorphism, but the implications are reversed if we treat humanity as just a part of an ecosystem. (Who said that!!!! I did not mention AGW!!!) Especially with the amount of ecological destabilization that pets and domesticated animals do, at the behest or laissez-faire of humans.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday October 03 2017, @11:24PM
Generally this happens when human interference has disrupted an ecosystem. The best option of course would be to reintroduce the natural predators to cull the deer herds, but people tend to be terrified of predators so we end up with a sort of farming of deer by and for people. The natural ups and downs of the cycle are disrupted that way and the ecosystem still suffers, those little ups and downs in predator/prey populations are an overlooked vital part of the natural cycle, human management of such things has a long way to go in understanding the actual process.