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Is It Ethical to Keep Pets?
Your answer depends on how important you think your own comfort is.
The primary product of pets these days is comfort. From another point of view, the primary labor they perform is service. And I’m not going to argue that that has no value, or that pets don’t benefit from their relationships with pet owners. I am going to point out that there is an impact on the animals we keep as pets, an impact on our environment, and a tremendous cost associated with keeping pets responsibly.
I would bet that most people don’t consider the ethical complications of keeping pets. They’re cute. They provide entertainment and comfort. They satisfy our impulse to help and nurture. But it’s worth asking if these benefits are sufficient to justify keeping pets, and we should weigh the costs and risks against the benefits.
People often try to offload the costs and risks of pursuing their own comfort, and this has taken some extreme forms. Europe unleashed chattel slavery on the world in hopes of enriching itself at the expense of people who lacked the ability to protect themselves against gunpowder and steel, and regular people were willing to tolerate it because the products of slavery — sugar, tobacco, cotton — made their lives marginally more comfortable.
