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Long post and maybe the conversation has moved on. If so, apologies.
I had my house rabbit spayed a couple of weeks ago, for two main reasons. The first was essentially convenience. Unspayed rabbits tend to be frustrated and destructive. The second was health. Unspayed does are extremely prone to uterine and ovarian cancers, which shorten their expected lifespans by a factor of five. I have largely convinced myself that the spaying was justified by concern for her health, rather than my convenience. Had she in fact been a male, I'm not sure I would have done it.
But it wasn't a two-dimensional choice. Domestic rabbits are frustrated and destructive because they are typically denied companionship by human choice. They are prone to cancer because they were bred to mate constantly by the Romans, who introduced them to the UK as food animals. So my duty of care, if it can be called that, is shaped not only by my decision to keep my rabbit as a pet (and thus deny her a "natural" life) but by human actions stretching back hundreds of years. And it's easy to pursue the "if she was wild ..." alternatives through many more iterations.
I offer this example because I think Tom is right to say that the principles of this argument are difficult to frame in the absence of an externally-imposed moral framework. The whole issue is compromised by millennia of animal-human interaction that make it difficult to achieve moral clarity even in the atomic system of one owner and one pet. I hadn't imagined, when I got my rabbit, that I'd feel so conflicted about the choices I make on her behalf, or that I wouldn't be able to resolve my doubts relatively quickly.
So while I somewhat share Loomis' frustration I'm not sure it's the board's reponse that's lacking, but rather that the issue is intractably complex already. Loomis says there's something ethically wrong with genetically modifying animals for our own pleasure. That may be true, but I'm not sure that this is a major issue today (as distinct from modifying animals for agricultural purposes, which obviously is). Or to put it another way, that perhaps the morality of pet ownership can fairly be discussed independently of the morality of domestication.
"Pet" or "livestock" seem, to me, to be labels whose definition inherently implies a level of animal-human symbiosis and are both exclusive and well-defined categories that resist significant changes. Exotics and show breeds notwithstanding, parameter changes in the terms of our relationships with animals - a tiger in a New York apartment, say, or dogs fattened up for the pot - are generally viewed unforgivingly. How many people thought that Roy was probably asking for it when Montecore jumped him?
That said, I find it disturbing that I can't find any moral clarity when it comes to my pet, or to the general phenomenon of pet ownership. As Quantum said, rights correspond to duties. My bottom-line morality is that I believe I have a duty to do no harm to anyone (or thing) without its informed consent, but how to judge "harm" or "consent" in the case of an animal that can't reliably communicate with me on either topic?
Mr Tricks asked if slavery would be less cruel if the slave could neither imagine a state of freedom nor a time in the future where one could or would be free. The assumption is that animals do not have such imaginings. Certainly, my rabbit can't articulate her desire for freedom as I can. But perhaps her programmatic urge to reproduce is just as meaningful as a slave's despair at hir captivity. It's certainly powerful enough to make her destroy large chunks of my carpet in a futile attempt at - at what? I can speculate, but I don't really know. Is it a protest? An escape attempt? An error of judgment?
Despite our tendency to adopt anthromorphic interpretations of our pets' behaviour, I think the internal lives of animals are almost completely alien to us. In the absence of any real idea about an animal's internal response to domestication - of how the slave feels about captivity - the muddled middle ground is the only real option for those who don't wish to adopt one of the polar stances on animal rights:
On the one hand, our "top predator" status suggests that it's only natural that we do whatever we like with other animals, as codified into dogma, theological or otherwise, that postulates mankind as a separate or higher creation, charged with both ownership of and responsibility for other lesser species. Many of us no longer believe that this privileged position really exists, or that it equates to "do whatever you like".
On the other hand, we have sentimental arguments that the wants and needs of animals can be simply equated to those of people. As Tom pointed out, a similarity in two situations does not equate to a similarity in rights. I would add that it isn't clear that there's a similarity in situations in the first place. We have no real way of knowing how an animal interprets any but the most obviously distressing of situations. Perhaps not even those.
Pet ownership seems to fall somewhere between the two. We assume, to paraphrase Haus, that we, as reasoning beings, are better equipped to make decisions for our pets than they are themselves. But we also believe that our pets appreciate and respond to many of the same stimuli as humans. I believe that my spayed rabbit would prefer a longer, more sedate life over a shorter and more sexually-crazed one. But I can't really tell.
To loop back to slavery: I think it's interesting that the "top predator" argument could equally be applied (with the relevant changes in wording) to the invidious rationalisations given for slavery, indentured labour and servitude in general. Animals today are the Other, just as Africans, Orientals, Indians, women, the working classes ... have been to various people at various times. Servitude has often been "justified" by theories of manifest destiny, evolutionary or social superiority.
The challenge confronting animal liberationists - or those trying to answer the initial post in this thread - is how to create an alternative perspective without lapsing into anthromorphism. Or one that argues that they have rights despite their inability to enter into social contracts - in which case it seems inevitable that the default position shifts back to "we know best", as it does for the severely learning-disabled. Otherwise, it seems to me, we're stuck with messy compromise, perhaps for ever - or at least until my rabbit learns to pass the Turing test.
And on the subject of the Turing test, we could extend the debate by asking: what should the rights of enslaved robots be? It's become a techo-utopian axiom that robots will one day take over most drudge-work, and an equally hackneyed science fiction theme that they will in turn rise up and throw off their shackles. Do workers that have explicitly been created to serve have rights, or do we have duties towards them? Does it make a difference if they are dumb droids or brilliant machines? Would it be right or wrong for us to keep them as slaves? |
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Spanish has different terms for body parts of humans (head, leg etc) and equivalent body parts of other animals……….and the concept of a pet as a family member is almost unknown!). 
lol