Pet Rentals

[zandperl]

Ever heard of rental pets? I hadn't either until Dolittler pointed it out. Apparently they're targeting my lovely state next.

I am writing to you today regarding the House act “An Act Prohibiting the Renting of Pets” (H.D. 4864). My name is ***, and I am **occupation** in **location**, and I live and vote in **location

Comments

[q10]

it just seems like an awfully strange set of priorities, even in the hypothetical world where these dogs are bred for this, are rented around for a few years, and are killed by relatively painless means (the particular operation you linked to appears to currently be doing much better than this, but details are scarce), they're still enjoying better lives than the vast majority of animals who live out their lives under the power and in the care of humans. i know you pick the political fights you can win, but it seems like this is singling out one class of businesses in drastic disproportion to the amount of evil they perpetrate, even by the moral standards that make this exercise seem like a good idea.

i'm sorry, pet people are always telling me i can't buy a nice cat-fur coat, and can't eat horses, and this and that and the other damn thing, and it smacks of the worst kind of speciesism. the callous speciesism that vegans complain about is at least coherent (humans tend to have salient cognitive capacities that dogs and pigs and monkeys generally lack), but the system that favors dogs and cats and horses over foxes and minks and pigs is jut offensively arbitrary - more to the point, it's imposing your own personal arbitrary preferences about which animals deserve better on everybody, like a coalition of Hindus showing up and taking away our burgers, because that happens to be what offend their arbitrary sensibilities.

[zandperl]

Your other arguments are entirely irrelevant to the issue of whether pet rentals are a good idea. They may be relevant to whether I have a coherent system of beliefs, but that is not the point of this post, and not what I am interested in discussing at this time.

Could you please clarify for me how it's a good thing for an animal to be repeatedly moved from home to home, bonding with one family and then being ripped from it over and over again?

[q10]

being good is not a prerequisite for being legal. people hold Klan rallies and put too much salt on their food and sell tickets to bad movies and say mean things to strangers in line to get subway passes and wear offensively ugly clothing and make stupid investment decisions that mean they won't be able to provide for their families as well as they would have otherwise. in none of these cases is it deemed appropriate to ban the practice outright (although in some there are regulatory measures to try to soften things a bit). further, there are in all these cases pretty good reasons why we shouldn't try to ban these things outright. if you want me to believe that this one industry is not merely bad-on-balance (of which i'm still unconvinced, because it's hard to establish a baseline), but bad enough to ban, then yes i'd like to see some show of good faith that you actually think the underlying moral standard is important enough to inform your policy positions, especially in the absence of any other really knock-down argument.

besides, i think that this kind of policy agenda promotes the culture of ‘if i don't see it, and if it doesn't happen to kinds of people and animals i'm familiar with, i don't have to care about it’, and i may not think i have the authority to ban that culture, but i sure as hell don't have to like it.

[q10]

also, an analogy - i'd be a lot more okay with a ban on all meat than a selective ban on the meats of kosher animals, because the state has a commitment to equal treatment of its citizens the spirit of which the second violates for no good reason (a ban on kosher slaughter practices would be more defensible, since there you can come up with some kind of reason). likewise, i'd be tentatively in favor of certain procedural changes to the criminal justice system that made things easier for defendants, but i'd be really freaked out by any proposal to extend the new procedural benefits selectively to one particular class of defendants, even if the distinction being made (say, drinking more than 300 cups of coffee a year) was not one with a lot of historical baggage. even if on balance restricting the exploitation of animals is good, selectively restricting certain people's animal exploitation practices can still be bad because it violates the state's moral commitment to fairness.