Pet Ownership Quotes

“Why is dog ownership so widespread and popular? It’s because human betas are trying to get in on the alpha action. They can’t control human beings, so they have to settle for dominating dumb brutes further down the evolutionary scale – but, hey, you’ve got to go where you’ve got to go, right?!”
― Joe Dixon, Character Wars: America's Failing Character

“A common misconception is that pets have easy lives. They don’t have to do any work to find food and shelter or to protect themselves from harm. But making life easy for captive animals doesn’t do them the great favor we might imagine. Providing them with appropriate challenges affords them opportunities to put their functional competencies to work, to engage in their full range of behaviors, and to engage their intelligence.1 And, in fact, various studies show that animals like to work and will engage in work for a reward, even if the reward is otherwise available for free. “Agency” has recently entered the vocabulary of animal welfare science and captures an important element of what animals in captivity need.”
― Jessica Pierce, Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets

“In the United States alone, the cost of veterinary care associated with genetic diseases in purebred dogs is estimated at a billion dollars each year! One out of every four purebred dogs is afflicted with a genetic problem serious enough that it can only be ended by euthanasia. Many dogs suffer silently with incurable diseases for their entire lives.”
― Charles Danten, Un vétérinaire en colère - Essai sur la condition animale

“In addition to selecting for infantile physical features in many of our pet breeds, we have carefully cultivated an infant-like dependency in many of them. Excessive demonstrations of affection have turned our dogs into eternal children, hyperdomesticated, docile, and servile to the extreme.”
― Charles Danten, Un vétérinaire en colère - Essai sur la condition animale

“What we are mistaking for a voluntary attraction of animals to humans can be explained by the “imprint phenomenon.” This biological process, first described by Konrad Lorenz, is responsible for the fact that animals, including humans, learn species-specific information, behaviours, and skills at specific points in their development. Imprinting is how animals learn early to attach to their mothers and identify with members of their own species. It is the mechanism that allows us to domesticate animals and nurture intimate relationships with them; as long as we integrate or selves into young animals’ lives before the attachment period ends, we can divert their identification with their own families and species onto ourselves.”
― Charles Danten, Un vétérinaire en colère - Essai sur la condition animale

“When a pet is adopted within its imprint period, the attachment it felt to its mother is quickly transferred to the new owner, who steps in to meet the pet’s physical and emotional demands. Herein lies the reason pets become so instantly bonded to us. The process may seem harmless on the surface, even natural, but keep in mind that the normal progression of things would have the young animal soon beginning to detach from its parent. Whereas the animal’s mother would discourage continued dependence, the surrogate mother, the new owner, encourages it. In this way, the case of usurped identity is never followed by detachment. Quite the contrary: the whole dynamic of interactions between people and their pets relies on the maintenance of the bond. Because of this, pets remain infantile, never reaching any level of autonomy or emotional maturity.”
― Charles Danten, Un vétérinaire en colère - Essai sur la condition animale

“Pet owners like to think of themselves as the parents of their animals, but they overlook the fact that the ‘children’ they claim are not their own. They are rather ‘children’ that were abducted from their natural communities.”
― Charles Danten, Un vétérinaire en colère - Essai sur la condition animale

“Pets that never go near areas in which a given disease is reported are routinely vaccinated against it anyway. A cat living alone on the twelfth floor in downtown Manhattan can receive up to ten vaccines at a time every year for life. A dog that never goes beyond the fire hydrant at the corner can be inoculated with up to twelve diseases each time.”
― Charles Danten, Un vétérinaire en colère - Essai sur la condition animale

“Encouraged by relaxed licensing requirements, pharmaceutical companies have flooded the market with unnecessary, poorly tested, and ineffective vaccines since the late 1970s. The focus is on creating wealth and jobs rather than quality products backed by sound medical and scientific evidence. In the United States alone, there are currently eighty trademarked canine vaccines, and as many for cats. It is possible to vaccinate animals against thirty diseases and counting. In 1998, vaccination specialist Dr. Richard B. Ford warned, “Most of these vaccines are so useless as to be called ‘vaccines in search of diseases.”
― Charles Danten, Un vétérinaire en colère - Essai sur la condition animale

“The perceived value of pets has been grossly exaggerated to stimulate demand and to create jobs and wealth. Although scarce for lack of public funding, the only decent research in the field has shown that the long-term benefits of pets are largely overrated, if not totally absent. The therapeutic value of zootherapy is of the same nature as that of gambling, binge-eating, and alcohol: it provides a transient, feel-good experience, but at a high cost to all involved.”
― Charles Danten, Un vétérinaire en colère - Essai sur la condition animale

“Animals are certainly attached to us, but they do not love us in the true sense of the word: their dependence is ensured when we take advantage of the imprint mechanism, the biological phenomenon that guarantees they will identify with us for life.”
― Charles Danten, Un vétérinaire en colère - Essai sur la condition animale