The Practice of Petkeeping: A Response to Hallie

In response to my post, Hallie asks the question: If petkeeping does need to be eradicated, what is the best way to begin that process? Should we do it all at once, or take steps toward the goal?

I have answered a similar question before about slaughterhouses, and my answer is the same. In the practice of petkeeping, small steps should be taken to eradication. Imagine if petkeeping were to be ended tomorrow: suddenly there would be millions, if not billions, of pets without a home. Pet owners would be distraught at having to give up the beloved members of their family. (The ones that care, anyway.) Shelters would suddenly be swarmed or ended, because there is nowhere else for the pets to go. What would happen to them? A lot of them can't survive on their own, and there is no one to care for them because petkeeping has ended. (Granted, this picture may be a bit extreme, but it does drive my point home.)

Another alternative would be to outlaw dogs and cats and any other pets from having any more young. This would allow people to enjoy the pets they have now, allow more pets to be adopted or bought, yet after this generation of pets there would be no more. Hopefully it would also cut back on the number of stray animals. Again, it would be an extreme shift for humans. Humans who enjoy the company of their animals would suddenly have no more and have no means by which to bring another pet into their family. Because humans and animals have lived together for so long, what happens to one will definitely affect the other, which is why I am inserting humans into this argument.

Tackling the different facets of the pet industry one at a time seems like the most rational solution to me. Someone made the point in class about outlawing puppy mills. Getting rid of the illegal ones is a good start. The illegal ones are where the most problems occur; everything is overcrowded and filthy, there is no room and the animals are all infested with parasites, and there is little to no food or water. It's disgusting. That is a practice that defintely needs to be stopped. There are so many directions to go in from there.

I now have two questions for you:
1) What would your next step be in eradicating the practice of petkeeping?
2) If we were to eliminate zoos and aquariums, how should we go about it?

Endangered Species

Yesterday in class, the topic of endangered species came up. The question was whether or not we should work to preserve the habitat in which endangered species lived in and then let nature take its course. However, I wondered if we should work to save any endangered species that were endangered because of humans in the first place. There is nothing that can be done about the Galapagos Tortoise. If I remember correctly, there is only one left alive in the world, and as far as I know humans had little to no part in the decline of that species. (If I am wrong, please let me know. I will edit this post accordingly.) In that regard, there is no need to intervene.

There are other species that have been hunted to extinction because of humans, such as the Tasmanian Tiger. Many other species are now endangered because of the loss of habitat, also due to humans. It is at this point that we run into the sticky situation that has been brought up many times in class: Do we step back and let nature take its course, or do we try to intervene to fix the problem that humans created? Personally, I feel that we should fight to save these species. Yes, perhaps they would have died out eventually without us, but we are greatly accelerating the rate in which they do so. As such, I feel we need to fight to keep these species alive for as long as we can.

My question is, what do you think?