Response to Courtney

In her blog Courtney posed the question, "is it wrong to take in a stray animal and give it a happy life that it would not have were it left alone"

I think that we have established in class that Paul Shepard was on to something when he said that there was something deeply wrong about petkeeping. I will assume that he is right for the sake of this post and try to answer the question from that point of view. I think if there is a stray animal that is suffering in the wild then it is probably doing so due to domestication by humans. If we had never started keeping these animals as pets, their ability to survive in the wild would be enough for them to lead "happy" lives. The problem is we can't know what exactly is a happy life for an animal. We can assume that it has interest in living and that's about it. Perhaps a stray cat, who more than likely could survive quite well on its own, has no interest in living with us and therefore we are not giving it a happy life but infringing upon its freedoms. Is our interest in keeping the cat more important than the cat's interest in its freedom? I don't think so.

Dog are another can of worms altogether. Most dogs, especially ones who have lived with humans before (and I doubt there are many truly wild dogs in America) would have a very difficult time getting by on their own. They depend upon people for their survival. They are domesticated past the point of knowing and enjoying their own freedoms. Their happiness is closely connected with our happiness in the most basic of ways. So, I think that it is completely morally defensible to take in a stray dog and give it a happy life because we have a better understanding of what constitutes happiness for a dog. It would not be morally defensible, however, to see a starving dog and do nothing to help it.

Humans have created the problem of domestication and now we have to deal with it. Even if we have suddenly come to the conclusion that petkeeping is immoral and needs to be eradicated, we cannot be excused from our responsibility to the creatures that we have essentially made our domesticated slaves. This leads me to ask, if petkeeping does need to be eradicated, what is the best way to begin that process? Should we do it all at once, or take steps toward the goal?