Companion Animal Care

Introduction...

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Facts and information

Adopt don't shop

Generally it is preferable to adopt pets from local shelters and have them neutered than it is to buy pets like a commodity from pet stores. The pet stores sources are breeder mills where animals are bred in often unacceptable conditions in cages etc and excess animals are often culled.

Even in rare cases where pet stores source from cruelty-free breeders, there are many animals in shelters that are actually in need of a forever home so it is better to adopt them than buy from pet stores.

Spay/Neuter your pet

Spaying and neutering can help to reduce the desire to roam that make your cats happier as indoor pets. . . the only thing more cruel than leaving a cat intact with a powerful sex drive and keeping it away from any mates would be to let the cat out doors to breed multiple generations of feral kittens who are doomed to suffer follow the Golden Rule here assuming you could never have sex you had no way to release any sexual frustration remember cats don't even have porn would you rather have a stronger sex drive or a weaker sex drive in such a situation I would want to be spayed or neutered to reduce my suffering.

Diet

Cats

Female cats can be fed vegan, if it's a properly formulated diet.[1]

Male cats can have urinary tract problems, so generally speaking, it's hard to feed most of them vegan.

I would recommend feeding male cats partly vegan, and partly freegan meat. Insects or worms might be another option to freegan meat, which are less sentient and more sustainable than tetrapod meat.

Exercise

It's important you exercise your pets to the full range their bodies needs, with big dogs that can mean two 1 and half hour walks every day, and with cats testing to see if they'll will walk with you on a leash.

Also using lots of interactive toys with them each night.

Cats

If you live near a main road, it's not recommended you let your cat out, where it can easily get run over by traffic.

Domestic cats are also highly skilled predators that are glutenous for enjoying the hunt more than the food, which means often torturing their prey and giving you half-dead animals as presents. Unlike the common ancestor they share with wildcats which are quick killers, consume all their food and have a working niche that is threatened by domestic cats.

If you want to take one step towards limiting the carnage, the RSPB recommends to:

Keep your cat indoors when birds are most vulnerable — at least an hour before sunset and an hour after sunrise — especially between March and July when baby birds may be out of the nest waiting to be fed. Also, keep your cat indoors after bad weather to allow birds to come out and feed.

You can also build an outdoor enclosed cat run and some inside the house to effectively increase your cats play area.

Waste

Dogs and particularly cat feces can be quite toxic and produces a lot of methane if left on a landfill to rot, finding an allotment or empty plot of land far away from houses to hot compost is the best solution.

Activism

Effective Activism

Adoption/Rescue

Adopting pets probably does not qualify as effective altruism due to the large cost and small impact.

It's also not entirely clear whether adoption is good for a cat or not (even among consequentialists, this is debated). The ideal case seems to be rescuing two (Citation needed) female cats from no kill shelters which are fed vegan (let meat eaters adopt the male cats and feed them the meat they may need to avoid urinary issues) kept indoors to prevent them from killing animals or being harmed themselves, and with enrichment like a cat patio or other activities. Yet we do not know what extent of boredom, confinement, or isolation over a lifetime make it better to have been euthanized. Be mindful that adopting an animal and making it miserable is probably worse than not adopting at all and keep in mind the difficulties involved in providing for the animal before making that commitment.

Donation/ other Activism

With respect to donation and volunteering, a disproportionate amount of current effort and money is devoted to pet rescue, so in terms of contributions to any efforts (even more effective ones like TNR) the point of diminishing returns is probably reached much sooner than with funding efforts to reduce farmed animal suffering.

Personal Growth/Virtue Activism

Existentialists see mountains of food waste, a disorganized network of rescue efforts and an untapped reservoir of compassion that simply needs to be directed towards simple tools for ending the suffering of these domesticated animals. By making the choice to be good industrious owners, we affirm that it is a valuable thing to do for our pets and those around us.

If you have the capacity and heart to, adopting the most vicious, scarred, mangey looking old pets from low demand, over-populated, no kill shelters is the most ethical choice you can make, but any will do for extending that carrier capacity of loving homes.

Enticing feral cats with freegan, vegan food will significantly improve their well-being to know they can have a food source they can rely on. Just be mindful that if you pay feral cats any attention they can return with a half-dead bird as a present in return. Feeding may also result in increased fertility.

Word usage

Some vegans and pet lovers argue that the terminology we use to refer to pets and the adoption process is also important, and promote terms like "animal companion" rather than pet, and dog/cat/etc. "parent" rather than owner to break the linguistic conventions that reinforce their status as property rather than family members. It's unclear what, if any, effect this has on social psychology, but evidence of marketing efforts to push these terms may suggest it does have an effect on the bottom-line for pet services, and thus at least the depth of owners' pockets when caring for them which may be a reflection of mindset.

Policy

Campaigns, petition your representative to...

Alternative Perspectives

Deontologists hold a variety of views on the subject, from no responsibility and always wrong to own them, to total responsibility and always right to feed them meat and let them hunt. This view can be very attractive to people, because we like to see ourselves as separate from nature, and see natural things as morally neutral or good even when they can be cruel or harmful to individuals. It's very easy to overlook the consequences and brush them off as nature doing what it does.