Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets

Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets by Jessica Pierce              Hardback Book:  256 pages               

You know the saying “after you see it, you can never unsee it again?”   This book is like that.     This book presents so much information on domesticated animals and exotic animals kept in homes both pro and con that being a part of the pet owning population – you will never look at pet ownership the same way again.     Ms. Pierce brings up the point that pet ownership is little more than slavery.   Some people acquire a “pet” dog for instance, but, then, they chain that dog up in their yard and may never take the chain off for the rest of the poor animal’s life.     It’s life revolves around the length of the chain.   No one  has much interaction with the animal – it is a watch dog – not that theoretically the poor thing can do much other than bark and alert its owner that someone or something is in the vicinity of the house.   It isn’t free to chase any intruder,   Often the animal Isn’t thought about as to if it is comfortable?   Does it have shade or a house to get out of the elements in?   It may be fed minimally but would any human want to live like that?   Domesticated animals should be treated with respect and given decent and fair treatment as a fellow living creature.    They all deserve love, too, in my book, but so many people consider animals lower than humans and perhaps that is how they can escape their consciences badgering them for unequal treatment.   While the author is a pet lover herself and has over the years bought her kids, fish, geckos lizards, turtles, gerbils, hamsters, mice and rats as pets, she also admits to feeling sorry for the creatures as they tend to have short lifespans.   She regrets that her children may have been a little rough in their loving of such delicate pets, though, she went over with them the proper and improper ways to handle them.   In her research for this book she went to some dark places, the fighting of animals, (birds, dogs, etc.)  where animals are abused by both the humans who own them as well as the life they are forced to lead until killed brutally in a fight.   It gets worse, there are websites for people who want to sexually abuse animals and for various fees they can go to places that keep animals for that purpose.    Remember I said once you see it, you can never unsee it?   When I read that my blood ran cold.   To think of poor innocent animals being horrendously abused and often killed by the violence, and people are doing this for profit.   It is heinous when such cruelty and torture happens to humans how less can we see it because it is being done to animals?   Ms. Pierce says there are animal activists who are trying to get more protective wording into law regarding the well being of animals who suffer at the hands of miscreants bent on unspeakable acts being performed on them.   Animals deserve their rights too and to be protected from rape and worse just as any being does.    This book delves into whether it is ethically moral to keep an animal in slavery even if it is considered a part of the family afterall, if an animals freedom to go where it wants to go but can only stay in a home or a crate or allowed out into a small yard to “do their business” then back to their owner’s will – isn’t that a kind of slavery?    The term for an animal’s owner is Master.   She discusses the issues of puppy and kitty mills – animals forced to breed over and over again often to their death or killed when they can no longer produce, forced to live in their own excrement and urine diseased and distressed until the breeders sell them to middlemen for the pet market in malls.   What happens to those puppies who aren’t sold?   They are either killed or sent to shelters that kill them soon after arrival if they aren’t adopted within days.    So many ethical questions are brought up in this book,  even the descent breeders – is it ethical to continue to breed animals bringing more puppies or kittens etc. into the world when the shelters are already so over run with animals that millions are killed every year?    Heart breaking realities are brought to light here but all that is brought up in this book is thought provoking and hopefully spurs everyone who reads it to become activists for the cause of those who cannot speak for themselves whether they be human or animal.   Good book if terribly heart breaking in some parts.    It will open your eyes.   I would recommend this book to mature teens on up to the elderly.  

- Shirley J