Let's Do More Than Celebrate National Pet Week

The theme of National Pet Week, May 6-12, is “Healthy Pets Make Happy Homes.” The theme of this essay, however, is broader in scope: animals are entitled to
certain rights, which have too long been denied by some humans.

Like most people with pets, I welcome National Pet Week, whose goal is to promote responsible pet ownership and to celebrate the bond between humans and other animals. Sadly, there are people who neglect and/or mistreat their own pets, but I’m not sure such people can be reached or reformed.

I have a little more hope that people who view animals as human resources – to be eaten, manipulated, or exploited for sport or money, for example – can be shown or persuaded that such an attitude is wrong. Unless more people believe this or are open to changing their views, the case for animal rights is lost. That is the contention of Tom Regan, who has written three books on this ethical issue, all of which make a strong case for the rights of all animals. “People must change their beliefs before they change their habits,” Regan correctly states, adding, “Enough people, especially those elected to public office, must believe in change – must want it – before wwill have laws that protect the rights of animals.”

Regan’s arguments are philosophical, for the most part. He contends that people haveduties to animals, just as they are responsible to one another. These include
the duty to be kind to animals, not cruel, the duty to recognize the inherent
value of animals, not just their usefulness to humans, and the duty to treat
animals according to moral standards.

Regan is uncompromising in his goals for the ethical treatment of animals: “the total abolition of the use of animals in science; the total dissolution of commercial
animal agriculture; the total elimination of commercial and sport hunting and
trapping.” To those who reject one or all of these proposals he argues that the
clubbing of baby seals, for example, follows from the harvesting of adult
seals; using animals to test the toxicity of cosmetics follows from using them
to test cures for disease; a veal calf killed to be eaten after close
confinement is not treated more humanely by giving it more space before it is
killed; giving lab animals more anesthesia or bigger cages is not ethical
treatment.

The eloquent, poignant words of Tom Regan in “In Defense of Animals” speak for many of us: “There are times, and these are not infrequent, when tears come to my eyes when I see, hear, or read of the wretched plight of animals in the hands of humans. Their pain, their suffering, their loneliness, their innocence, their death. Anger. Rage. Pity. Sorrow. Disgust. The whole creation groans under the weight of the evil we humans visit upon these mute, powerless creatures. It is our hearts, not just our heads, that call for an end to it all, that demand of us that we overcome, for them, the habits and forces behind their systematic oppression. All great movements,it is written, go through three stages: ridicule discussion, adoption. It is the realization of this third stage, adoption, that requires both our passion and our discipline, our hearts and our heads. The fate of animals is in our hands. God grant that we are equal to the task.”