Safety

We all want our pets to be safe. I work hard to ensure that my dogs don't end up injured or sick when it can be avoided, as do most people who own pets. As a member of the veterinary community I am forever advocating those things which are the most conservative, safest course of action.

That being said, I also believe that dogs and cats, horses and goats are still animals, and as such they deserve a life that is as full as we, their caretakers can possibly make it. Herein lies the contradiction. A cat that lives outdoors has a full and glorious life, for an average of about 4 years. An indoor cat may have a lazier, less excitement filled life, but will live upwards of 20 years.

The stakes are even higher for horses. Horses seem to spend their lives in pursuit of disabling injury or gruesome death. While they do not appear to be safe anywhere, we know that the least safe place is a pasture, however, a horse in pasture is also a happy horse.

So, where do we strike the balance? The simplest answer would be that any action that provides an animal a safe environment yet denies them the ability to pursue basic functions of their species is fundamentally unfair.

It is a simple sentence to write, and a much harder sentence to act upon. Cats are hunters. They stalk, catch, terrorize and eat prey. They cannot do this very well in most homes. Cat owners can, through interactive play, mimic the feel of most of these actions for their cats, and those cats may do fine living an indoor only life. I suspect, however, that most cats do not receive stimulating play that mimics hunting or stalking behaviors on a regular basis. These cats lie around their homes like pillows and are generally overweight and bored.

I'm not attacking cat owners here, nor am I making a judgment call. Being bored and fat describes many Americans and most teenagers, we certainly wouldn't recommend chucking them into the wild and telling them that they'll have a better life if they are permitted to chase wild animals with a knife.

What I am saying is that in a society increasingly risk-averse, and in a society that is increasingly seeing pets as furry people, we run the danger of failing to provide the basic needs of the very pets we seek to keep safe.

We also run the very real risk of judging people who we feel are being unnecessary blasé' about the health of their animals. Horses once lived in barbed wired fences. Horses in large pastures still do. Tell a backyard horse owner that your horse is in a barbed wire pasture and you may as well tell them that you trained them using a baseball bat. Barn cats are going extinct, for good or ill, largely because as a society the idea of a cat outside in the barn (a self-contradictory statement if there ever were one) is akin to animal abuse.

We all like to use the phrase, "I would never..." to express our disgust at whatever it is that has offended us. "I would never..." leaves a great deal to be desired when it comes to reasoned discourse. Obviously all of us know that there are many things that "no sane person would ever.." and these we have agreed upon as a society, but when we start off from our limited perspective, we limit the conversation.

We need to realize that animal abuse is an overt act that causes pain in an animal. It is not a husbandry choice that causes inconvenience. Cats have lived in barns for millennia, dogs have slept on porches since there were porches to sleep in, before that they slept around the campfire, as
we all did, and just because you would never, doesn't mean that no one should.