Is it immoral to keep pets?

[Char-Nobyl]

Picture the scene. You're just a human kid minding your own business when suddenly without warning, super-intelligent aliens take you away from your mother and into a strange new place run by other aliens.

That would make a whole lot more sense if household pets were wild animals. You know, because you imply they're being taken from the wild and not, say, a shelter and what have you.

You can't understand more than a word or two of their language and most of it's simply unlearnable by human ears for various reasons, yet they scold or hit you whenever you do something against their arbitrary rules which to you make no sense. You are fed either scraps from the table, or second rate food they buy specially. You have to pretend to be eager and be a "good human" when your masters return if you want to ever get any treats. If you're unfortunate, they may live in an environment which you can't survive in and so the rest of your life will be confined to one small tank.

...second rate? You're already getting food bought specifically for you, and you're a completely different species than your resident overlord. Aren't you in the least concerned with the possibility that their food might not be good for you?

When they go out, you are left alone or in the car or tied up outside, or if you're lucky you might get to come along with a rope tied around your neck so you can't escape from your "family".

Yep. Because that's the thing on every dog's mind: escape from the horrible, two-legged creatures that've been holding it prisoner. Not "Run around and explore before returning" or "Find out what's making that awesome smell" or "Investigate and/or have sex with that dog of the opposing gender you see."

If the aliens keep more than one human of different genders, then there's a good chance that they'll have you castrated to prevent the inevitable,

Oh no! How horrible to wake up and no longer feel boiling rage at the sight of other human males within my territory, or overwhelming lust at the sight of females. I sure would hate being able to interact with others of my species on levels more complex than "Fight or screw."

or perhaps worse maybe use you as a breeder and then take your kids away before they're grown. The aliens have far longer a lifespan than humans and so when you get old and too expensive to keep, they have you euthanatised, cry a few crocodile tears and then forget about you when they go buy a new pet human. That is your life.

Wow. Somehow I don't think you've ever had a dog, cat, or anything longer-living than a goldfish. Nor do I think you're very good at concealing ulterior motives and personal biases.

This may sound like a horror story

No, it doesn't. It sounds like a lopsided and poorly-founded attempt at shocking people into siding with you. How about this:

"You're growing up with all your siblings, minding your own business, and suddenly, a whirlwind of spinning metal death cuts you down at the ankles and sucks you into a huge container of some sort. If you live long enough, you'll find yourself minced into tiny pieces, mixed with other people, and then baked into food for a terrible species of giants.

Such is the terrifying life of wheat."

but in fact it's the grim reality of the millions of animals kept by us humans as "pets".

Oh, I get it now. So you interviewed actual pets for this? Because otherwise, it'd be shockingly presumptuous to think that your intelligence and point of view can be shrunk and bestowed upon something of an entirely different species.

I often see discussions about the morality of eating animals, or farming them for fur, but rarely this question comes up so I ask you Escapists today, is it really morally okay to keep animals as pets or do animals deserve the right to be free?

...huh. You mention pets and fur...but are farm animals mysteriously exempt from this? Are all animals magically off-limits to human interaction? Because there's a distinct reason why we have canine teeth alongside molars: we're omnivores. We eat meat. We've collectively eaten so much meat for so long that evolution saw fit to give us the means to eat meat more efficiently.

So is eating meat okay, but keeping a dog isn't? If that's your opinion, you're trying to point out a line between the two where no line exists. Though I somehow doubt that you're okay with eating meat, since you strike me as a textbook 'Meat is murder' sort.

 

[Orekoya]

I guess that is where we disagree then, when it comes to something like childbirth I don't have all the information, so yes, I lack some variables to understand that fully, but I only accept something if it can be applied to all similarly structured situations at the same time.
Allowed to have an opinion on pet keeping > Must own a pet
Allowed to have an opinion on killing > Must have killed
The only thing that has changed is the variables, the core concept stays the same.

The thing is though everyone dose this all the time, we can look at a posted or trailer for a film or a game and because we have seen all the individual elements before we just know weather or not we will like it, now someone who has never seen a particular film can't really judge the quality of the film but they can still tell if its for them. E.G. I haven't seen the last four Harry Potter films because I know I wouldn't like them but I do also accept that means I don't have all the individual variables to say weather or not it is objectively a good film.

My point is if someone thinks that keeping a pet is immoral then they wont keep a pet to see if its immoral.

As for the statement, "Also I was referring to the logical fallacy of appealing to extremes where one erroneously attempts to make a reasonable argument into an absurd one, by taking the argument to the extremes."
I don't really know how to argue against this because apart form the "erroneously" and "reasonable argument" it's true, using extremes is a way of showing the flaws in any argument, not just ones that are perceived as reasonable. The best example I can think of is Schroedinger's cat.

Except nobody said you were not allowed to have an opinion on pet keeping, so the core concept isn't the same. The original poster you started the conversation with said "if you have a pet you'll have more of an insight into the morality of pet-keeping than if you do not keep a pet". He's saying you have more insight if you have the experience than not. Nobody is making the argument in the way you are putting it so you are taking their argument (the level of reasonable whatever you might credit it but I personally would agree that yes, experience does help shape morality since it's one of those four building blocks of morality: empathy, experience, education and reason) and turned it into something else erroneously then compared it to murder.

Also for the record, in my original post I actually say I'm not against pet keeping as such just the fact that we're in this situation now, and I have actually owned pets so unlike Harry Potter I do have the variables for this particular situation.

So wait, you've owned pets and thus have the experiences of pet ownership but you don't see how that experience may in some way also be a part of your personal decision on pet ownership? I give up.

 

[DaKiller]

I have friends and grandparents with dogs and cats and I've seen the owners often ascribe emotions or thoughts that are clearly too complex for that sort of animal onto their pet ... Stockholm syndrome is a thing too, aside from the joking quip by Tippy above me, perhaps your pets don't realise how happy they'd be in the wild with their own species?

Now wait just a second. You claim that pets cannot have emotions that are too complex but that they can also have Stockholm Syndrome? And if pets could have Stockholm Syndrome, then wouldn't they have it in roughly the same percentage as humans which is not even half of human hostages? And are you claiming that domesticated animals are capable of surviving when in actuality a whole hell of a lot of them would die if they were just released into the wild? These are questions you need to answer if you don't think domesticated animals should be kept as pets.

A little more OT, Domesticated animals can't just be released into the wild for the same reason that wild animals cannot just be domesticated: it is not in their nature.