The ultimate goal of environmentalism has been to restrain people’s activities.
Not content with man-made global warming, environmental hysteria have now spread to targeting pet ownership in order to allegedly save wildlife.
From Slate.com
You know what animal makes a good pet? No animal.Some people like or have pets, many don’t.
Dogs will bite you to death and then eat your corpse. Snakes will asphyxiate you, escape, infest the Everglades, and eat all its mammals. Pet parrots perpetuate a trade that upends ecosystems, and hamsters pass you dangerous zoonotic diseases. But perhaps the worst pet of all, environmentally speaking, is a cat.
Domesticated cats started out as parasites on human civilization. Unlike other species, and admittedly to their credit, they domesticated themselves. When humans started growing grain, the crops attracted rodents that attracted cats. Wild cats evolved into housecats, and they were quite useful for thousands of years, killing disease-ridden rats and mice and protecting our food stockpiles. But now that we have industrial farming, reliable food storage, and mostly mouse-proof houses, cats are mere parasites again. Playful and often affectionate parasites, sure, and adorable when young, but a scourge on the landscape.
An economist in New Zealand named Gareth Morgan has made the logical and quite correct case that his island nation should eliminate its cats in order to protect its endangered birds. He means “elimination” in the most humane way possible: Existing pets should be spayed and neutered and allowed to live out their lives, but no new cats should be allowed to be born or imported. He is not advocating that people poison feral cats, as a former researcher at the Smithsonian National Zoo was convicted of doing a few years ago. Nor does he say people should shoot them, as particularly avid birdwatchers have done. That would be really wrong.
Morgan points out that your cat “is actually a friendly neighborhood serial killer.” He may sound like some wretched, obsessed Jonathan Franzen character, but his Cats To Go project isn’t meant as a caricature of environmentalism. He’s asking people to pledge to neuter their cats, keep them indoors, and not get any new ones.
For those who fancy non-commercial ownership of pets, the benefits are subjective, mostly psychological and emotional, perhaps manifested through desire for companionship, leisure or amusement or as outlet or from peer pressure or for many other reasons.
The global pet industry has been estimated at $49 billion in 2012 with pet food sales accounting for 37.8% according to Mintel. That’s how much some people will pay for products and services for their pets. Pet ownership thus is a human activity.
Of course, there are consequences to every action.
The article has framed pet ownership, particularly cats as threat to the ecosystem. Cats have been cited as having been responsible for some bird extinction in some areas, for instance. There are more. But these are referenced to stray cats.
The article has been quiet about the policy implications.
But the intent seems to be the implied use of force to make cat owners “pledge to neuter their cats, keep them indoors, and not get any new ones”.
Such environmental hysteria would eventually lead to social policies that will restrict cat ownership. Eventually this will spread to other forms of pets.
This translates to the expansion of the bureaucracy for the enforcement of these new legislations of keeping in check people’s pet activities.
Yet people will have to pay more taxes to sustain such bureaucracy.
Moreover, people will be fined or see prison terms for infringements of pet laws. Violence may even be an outcome from enforcing such rather seemingly trivial laws.
For me, the means (regulatory restrictions) to the attain the end (environment) is like using bazookas to kill rats, where the costs (financial, regulatory and civil liberties) to attain pet controls will largely exceed the supposed benefits (environment).
Ultimately the beneficiaries of environmental politics will be the government, who will now have despotic powers not only to pick more resources from people’s pockets, but importantly, to invade on people’s properties and privacies in order just to enforce pet laws.
This is socialism camouflaged as environmentalism
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