Common sense pets

There is a mania gripping this country regarding pets. It is being driven by people who love animals, who work with rescues, who share horror stories of abuse on social media, and it runs the risk of placing those of us who care about our animals, but who do not call them 'babies', who do not think clicker training can solve all problems, who think that horses should have jobs and no harm will come to most dogs if they sleep outside, on the margins of the pet-owning world.

Long gone are the days of socially acceptable barn cats breeding generations of inbred unvaccinated kittens, or people who shoot the family dog because it ate the chickens being permitted to say so in normal company. These people and these situations still exist, but they have been moved to the fringes, their actions border and in some cases cross the line into abuse and actionable intervention by legal authorities. The world is a better place because of this.

However, we are in danger of swinging past the middle ground where barn cats - spayed and vaccinated - can still exist, and a dog that eats chickens can be re-homed without recrimination. We are fast approaching a world where government driven by public opinion, not science, or fact will dictate when it is too hot or cold for pets to spend time outdoors, where horses who do not wear blankets or live in barns are considered 'neglected' or where hunters are cursed as murderers by people who eat meat and wear leather.

We are collectively losing our minds where animals are concerned, and it is my contention that there needs to be a voice of reason for those of us who believe that animals are not babies, those mewling helpless infant humans who cannot feed themselves, but are independent beings who have urges and needs that are both real and often underserved, and who need advocates who respect that fact.

I am a certified veterinary technician. I believe in excellent veterinary care for pets and find it abhorant when people choose price over quality for veterinary care. I believe in spaying and neutering, I believe that pets from the pound can be wonderful, and purebred pets from backyard breeders and puppy mills can be costly, heartbreaking disasters.

I worked for several decades in the equine industry. I hate unfair training practices, am not a fan of Tennessee Walkers and suffer from a strong love/hate relationship with horse racing. I think too many horse breeds have been damaged by judges who have lost touch with performance, and I think that even my beloved dressage sometimes rewards horses with forced, ugly but rhythmic movement over beautiful and flowing but slightly uneven tests.

I was a vegetarian for 8 years, and I still cringe whenever I think of factory farming. I try to find ways to eat from better sources, but sometimes I fail. I have never tasted veal, and never will. I have eaten a bison killed by my own father and found it very tasty. I feel that an animal that lives happy and free and has one very bad day is better off than an animal forced into cramped, unsanitary and unnatural housing for the length of it's entire brief life and then is systematically killed. I think we would all be better people if we were forced into fields with guns and had to choose the cow that would feed our family for the coming year.

I believe that everyone who loves and cares for animals and pets is at some points a hypocrite. We will be horrified at a photo of a dead giraffe killed by a hunter, yet we will laugh with forks full of chicken killed for us by proxy in the millions. We will find the actions of others always worse than that of our own.

I believe that we as animal lovers, and advocates must own our hypocrisy. We have to own the reality that we are not dealing with rational forces on the fringes of the debate in which we are engaged. We must let science and reality and common sense dictate our stances, and when our stances diverge (as they must - since we're all hypocrites) we have to be watchful that we do not devolve into name calling and accusation, but rather enter (as best we can) into reasoned debate, and be prepared to find that we are wrong.

Also we have to be prepared to understand that many of these debates are opinions, the facts such as they are, are muddy at best. We are entitled to hold those opinions, and entitled to explain how we formed them in an ongoing and rational debate, but when reasoned opinions are overtaken by dogma we all fall into the trap of losing credibility. Animals demand our care and our support, they demand lives that are respectful of what their lives mean to them, not how we perceive them or how we would wish them to be. This should be the underlying goal of all animal lovers, and when we lose sight of this we endanger the very lives we seek to protect.