Pet Rentals

[asterroc]

Ever heard of rental pets? I hadn't either until Dolittler pointed it out. Apparently they're targeting my lovely state next.

I am writing to you today regarding the House act “An Act Prohibiting the Renting of Pets” (H.D. 4864). My name is ***, and I am **occupation** in **location**, and I live and vote in **location**.

Pets are an important addition to our quality of life, and many of us view them as family members. Even Presidential candidates talk about their pets as they promote their candidacy for office. However, as humans it is our job to be stewards for them, as they cannot speak for themselves. Hence I am writing to you today about the disturbing new practice of "rental pets" by companies such as the FlexPets (http://www.flexpetz.com/) and their attempt to make inroads into our state.

Services such as pet-sitting while on vacation and dog-walking during the day while we are at work are important. These services allow the animals customary caretaker to provide care to our animals while we are out of town or unable to do so, while still allowing our animals to live in a stable loving home. A rental pet company on the other hand, treats animals as disposable toys, to be put away (or put down!) when the owner does not have the time or energy for the animal.

Besides such a service shifting the public viewpoint of animals from creatures in our care to commodities, the individuals animals in question do not have stable loving homes, and instead are constantly shipped from one home to another. Imagine if we started renting out human children the same way! Ultimately, a culture that believes in the disposability of pets is one destined to suffer strain on its public and private resources through increased pet abandonment.

I urge you to evaluate “An Act Prohibiting the Renting of Pets” (H.D. 4864) proposed by Massachusetts State Representative Paul Frost, and similar legislature in the Senate, with these cautions in mind. Please ask Rep. Angelo Scaccia and the Senate as well to move “An Act Prohibiting the Renting of Pets” (H.D. 4864) without delay into the appropriate committee. Passing such an act would send a message not only to companies who would exploit our pets in novel ways, it would also serve as a model for our entire country as to how responsible stewardship for pets is best achieved—by rejecting practices which would undermine their stable role in society.

Thank you for your time, and please feel free to contact me with any further questions you may have.

Send the email to your state Reps, and also the following people:
Rep.AngeloScaccia@Hou.State.MA.US
Rep.PaulFrost@Hou.State.MA.US
Rep.JohnFresolo@Hou.State.MA.US

And one more link
http://www.dogboston.com/blog/general/looking-for-action-on-anti-pet-rental-bill/

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

hey, all other domestic animals are treated as commodities, to be slaughtered as soon as they get plump enough or have enough fur - why should your favorites get a special exemption from this commodity-for-human-amusement status?

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Dogs are not my favorites, they are some of my least favorites as far as potential pets go b/c like every furred animal I'm allergic to them, but unlike most they won't stay the fuck away from me are highly social with humans and want to interact with us all more closely than my comfort or allergies allow.

And I never said that treating other animals as a commodity was a good thing. I'm just taking action on one particular instance of it. And I don't feel this is extreme action on my part either - I'm not against pet ownership, I'm just against institutionalizing serial pet ownership without any responsibility towards the pet. Basically I'm against Brittany Spears -style pet ownership.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

And I never said that treating other animals as a commodity was a good thing

But you directly support industries that treat animals much worse by eating meat. Just sayin'.

[q10.livejournal.com]

it just seems like an awfully strange set of priorities, even in the hypothetical world where these dogs are bred for this, are rented around for a few years, and are killed by relatively painless means (the particular operation you linked to appears to currently be doing much better than this, but details are scarce), they're still enjoying better lives than the vast majority of animals who live out their lives under the power and in the care of humans. i know you pick the political fights you can win, but it seems like this is singling out one class of businesses in drastic disproportion to the amount of evil they perpetrate, even by the moral standards that make this exercise seem like a good idea.

i'm sorry, pet people are always telling me i can't buy a nice cat-fur coat, and can't eat horses, and this and that and the other damn thing, and it smacks of the worst kind of speciesism. the callous speciesism that vegans complain about is at least coherent (humans tend to have salient cognitive capacities that dogs and pigs and monkeys generally lack), but the system that favors dogs and cats and horses over foxes and minks and pigs is jut offensively arbitrary - more to the point, it's imposing your own personal arbitrary preferences about which animals deserve better on everybody, like a coalition of Hindus showing up and taking away our burgers, because that happens to be what offend their arbitrary sensibilities.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Your other arguments are entirely irrelevant to the issue of whether pet rentals are a good idea. They may be relevant to whether I have a coherent system of beliefs, but that is not the point of this post, and not what I am interested in discussing at this time.

Could you please clarify for me how it's a good thing for an animal to be repeatedly moved from home to home, bonding with one family and then being ripped from it over and over again?

[q10.livejournal.com]

being good is not a prerequisite for being legal. people hold Klan rallies and put too much salt on their food and sell tickets to bad movies and say mean things to strangers in line to get subway passes and wear offensively ugly clothing and make stupid investment decisions that mean they won't be able to provide for their families as well as they would have otherwise. in none of these cases is it deemed appropriate to ban the practice outright (although in some there are regulatory measures to try to soften things a bit). further, there are in all these cases pretty good reasons why we shouldn't try to ban these things outright. if you want me to believe that this one industry is not merely bad-on-balance (of which i'm still unconvinced, because it's hard to establish a baseline), but bad enough to ban, then yes i'd like to see some show of good faith that you actually think the underlying moral standard is important enough to inform your policy positions, especially in the absence of any other really knock-down argument.

besides, i think that this kind of policy agenda promotes the culture of ‘if i don't see it, and if it doesn't happen to kinds of people and animals i'm familiar with, i don't have to care about it’, and i may not think i have the authority to ban that culture, but i sure as hell don't have to like it.

[q10.livejournal.com]

also, an analogy - i'd be a lot more okay with a ban on all meat than a selective ban on the meats of kosher animals, because the state has a commitment to equal treatment of its citizens the spirit of which the second violates for no good reason (a ban on kosher slaughter practices would be more defensible, since there you can come up with some kind of reason). likewise, i'd be tentatively in favor of certain procedural changes to the criminal justice system that made things easier for defendants, but i'd be really freaked out by any proposal to extend the new procedural benefits selectively to one particular class of defendants, even if the distinction being made (say, drinking more than 300 cups of coffee a year) was not one with a lot of historical baggage. even if on balance restricting the exploitation of animals is good, selectively restricting certain people's animal exploitation practices can still be bad because it violates the state's moral commitment to fairness.