Stray Dogs Deserve Back Rubs
We kill millions of pets every year. Who cares if a few get posh shelters and humane laws?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, January 14, 2005
OK. So I tend to think people who insist on calling themselves
pet "guardians" instead of "owners" are exasperating and a bit
wrongheaded, and that such uber-PC thinking does almost nothing to
change or improve the behavior of the thousands of animal abusers in
this country.
And I tend to agree with fabulous dog writer Jon Katz that such
semantic sidestepping does more harm to the animals than good, and
leads to naive treatment, lack of decent training and an outright
ignorance of the creature's very cool dogness.
What about all those new ultra-posh pet boutiques and the concomitant
trend toward the wild overpampering of our "companion" animals? Silly
if not outright depressing, really, given how we appear to be
projecting ourselves, our desires and habits and need for intimate
TLC, onto an animal that really couldn't care less.
Further, I think the shift toward treating dogs and cats as full-
blown family members, as surrogate kids or surrogate mates or
surrogate babies, is even worse, as we are loading up our animals
with far too much emotional liability and psychological complexity,
granting a completely unique species an impossible array of human
traits and emotional responses they don't have or need or understand,
which then only causes stress and resentment and chewed shoes and
deeper personal depression as you, the "guardian," slowly realize the
dog can't have meaningful sex with you or take you to dinner or help
decorate the Christmas tree or talk to you calmly about just what the
hell is going on with your hair.
However.
Let us not get carried away. There are issues of pet treatment and
animal care that are vital and urgent and necessary, that speak to
our moral fiber and emotional core and our ability to have compassion
and love and a sense of humane decency and passable kibble.
Let us allow for new rules that give our pets some basic rights and
desist, furthermore, in comparing a given city's treatment of found
strays and rescued pooches to, say, our treatment of the homeless, an
issue that just came up again in San Francisco as the City just
passed new laws redefining what constitutes minimal humanitarian
treatment of our pets (a city, by the way, that already officially
uses guardian instead of owner) and a few officials were concerned
about that very point, that we were treating dogs better than people,
to which we can only say, oh please.
One: no, we're not. Two: yes, maybe we should. And three: get over
it.
Let us now, instead, hold up the positive pet-treatment issue overall
as righteous and good and necessary in this time of puppy mills and
overbreeding and general degradation and destruction and war and
Bush.
It's a large and increasingly important issue, floating over our
wildly pet-lovin' culture like a giant question mark: What do our
animals deserve? What are their true rights? What constitutes humane
or decent treatment in the face of a culture that casually kills
millions of unwanted pets every year and openly massacres billions
more animals for food and doesn't blink an eye?
And what infinitesimal steps, more broadly speaking, can we as a
species take to maybe just slightly lighten the load of massive
destruction we heap upon the animal kingdom in general and pets
and/or food animals specifically?
Let's just say it outright: in terms of social care and protection
and basic rights, dogs (and cats too -- but I focus on dogs here
because I know them better and cats come with a different set of
strange and baffling issues given how you can apparently own 157 of
them and still pretend to function, and I think cats are generally
odd and alien and generally speaking most really wouldn't mind if we
humans just vanished from the planet altogether -- but, hey, that's
just me), dogs deserve every goddamn luxury we can throw at them.
Look. Nearly every homeless person in any city possesses free will
and functioning bipedal brains and has access to food and shelter and
social services, and most can take advantage of them whenever they
like and I know, I know, it's more complicated than that and fraught
with a hundred other issues and policies and health-care woes, claims
of overcrowded shelters and drug addictions and horrific psychiatric
problems. Fine. But it's essentially true.
Whereas. Dogs are 100 percent dependent. On us. Completely at our
mercy, unable to exert any sort of control over their own fate or
their own health and we as a nation show very little of that mercy
overall, killing as we do about 5 million unwanted dogs and cats
every year. That's million.
Abused, abandoned, sick, too large too small too loud too furry too
unstable too slobbery, unwanted for a thousand different reasons,
bred for fighting or for aggression and therefore unadoptable once
they've been dumped by their brutal and small-minded owners, or
they're diseased and left tied to trees and malnourished and beaten
with chains. And each one, unlike humans, completely innocent of its
domestic circumstances, and completely powerless to change them.
Five million. That's about 14,000 animals put to death every day. Or
600 every hour. Ten animals every minute. Go ahead. Pause right here.
Wait one minute. There you go, 10 more dead pets. OK? You want to
compare suffering of a species for our rather selfish benefit to that
of the deeply complex but far more psychologically accessible
homeless issue? Give me a break.
Look. Ask any Humane Society or rescue worker and you'll get an
earful about how we overbreed and underprotect pets and don't spay or
neuter nearly enough, and we as a culture don't seem to really give
much of a crap about the overall toll, about the sheer volume of
death and neglect and abuse, out of sight out of mind and let's just
all smile at the shiny happy golden retrievers at the beach while the
shelter quietly puts down yet another pit bull that should never have
been bred in the first place.
And hence right now despite the slightly annoying and highly gushy
politically correct attitude of many dog advocates here in S.F. and
Berkeley, I am overall still just incredibly proud to live in a city
that has voted to give a tiny bit more power to the underfunded and
understaffed Animal Care and Control people to enforce some basic
laws of pet treatment and care (clean water, basic shelter, edible
food, no inhumane constraints). I mean, so what?
Hell, plethoric are the places in this nation and on this planet
where animals in general and dogs in particular are largely still
considered disposable hunks of barely tolerated meat, where they are
regularly kicked to the curb or thrown out of speeding trucks or
blasted in the groin with shotguns for fun or bred by inner-city
thugs to mutilate each other in fight pens, and maybe you'll agree:
give me stricter pet laws and posh dog-rescue digs and more expensive
no-kill shelters in the world's most progressive American city any
goddamn day.
Hey, it's the least we can do.
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