The stillness of boredom. That utterly impenetrable nothing. The lifeless day that promises but never delivers. The cat knows this boredom as well as I do. He lays there on the kitchen tile motionless apart from the slow rise and fall of the belly fur. He is bored. There is nothing to do. Sometimes he can be roused by a game of mousey mouse. But not today. This is no ordinary boredom, this is depression.
It’s bad enough being a human and bored but imagine being a creature descended from the most highly-developed carnivorous hunters of all the mammals. Imagine possessing the ability to solve complex problems and jump six times your own height from a dead stop. Imagine having all this and then being relegated to sitting on laps and eating food from a can. Your whole life reduced to that of an amusement for humans.
This is the ugly truth for most pets. They are simply there for our pleasure, something to pat when we get home from work. As much as we may profess to “love” our pets and I’m sure we do in this very selfish way, we really aren’t doing them any favours. We are condemning them to a life of boredom. From fish to dogs, from cats to the worst crime of all - birds in cages, pets are sentient life forms we enslave for our own gratification.
And so the argument follows that without us these animals would suffer a cruel fate at the hands of Mother Nature. Of course this reasoning is entirely moot as these species simply would not exist in their current form had we not domesticated them in the first place. But putting this aside, what is a life of incarceration worth? Would you rather live a week of unbridled fancy or a lifetime of imprisonment and boredom? The decision is an easy one for me.
People have been keeping pets as companions for many centuries and although there is obviously some benefits for the animal, the power dynamic is heavily skewed in favour of the human. It is an obvious window into the larger power dynamic at play; the desire for humans to control all aspects of life. We are deeply committed to controlling our environment and have a strong urge for certainty and routine. This has also extended to our need for dominance over our nonhuman companions. I do wonder however at the mostly unknowable psychological damage we are doing to these animals?
This is another example of the flickering torch of bad ideas being passed down through the generations. I give pet ownership 👎👎👎 / 5.
The Flickering Torch of Bad Ideas
Thanks for those reflections. When a youngster, I had pets and loved it but I have always been somewhat vexxed by the issue - they have been treated as live toys for the benefit of humans. Now, as an adult now, I have sworn off them.