I’ve written often on pet ownership (perhaps too often from pet owners’ perspectives), but that’s because people devote huge amounts of resources to pets, while both human and ecological suffering is accelerating. This makes the continued celebration and encouragement of pet ownership morally questionable, particularly when just last week the latest Living Planet Report found that monitored wildlife populations have shrunk 73% over the past 50 years, primarily from habitat loss and land degradation from the global food system (yes, including feeding pets grain, soy, meat, and fish).
So, while pet ownership may seem like a value-neutral issue (and none of my business), it is like having children or a large house or flying—fulfilling one’s desires without restraint has a direct impact on the lives of countless other beings around the world.
That came to mind as I read this recent New York Times article on how South Korea has gone from eating dogs to treating them like family members, all in a very brief period of time. The article even shows a video of a deceased dog being cremated, while the bereaved “pet parent” looks on through a viewing window.1
That’s nothing new—though the accelerated transition from meat source to family member is striking (and is probably a celebrated case study in the pet industry)—but the extent to which extreme pet consumption has infected South Korean culture is shocking. Examples from the article include a person buying a $150 jacket for her dog while wearing an old $38 jacket herself; online malls selling more carriages for dogs than for babies; total dog care centers, complete with trainers, doctors, and groomers; and even an app that helps people find pet-friendly vacations and restaurants.

You’ll Be Called Fido in Your Next Life
But what’s particularly disturbing is the enabling role of religion in condoning, even encouraging this form of overconsumption. The New York Times article describes how pet owners brought their dogs to a picnic at a Buddhist Temple, robing both humans and dogs with gray Buddhist vests, with the head monk (complete with dog in tow) explaining that humans may become dogs in their next life. Think about that: knowing you might become a dog surely encourages pet owners to spend even more money caring for their pets.2
I get it. Maybe we’re so disconnected from nature that we’re desperate to bond with a species other than our own, or maybe as this article describes, our social isolation and having children later creates a need to nurture some other being. But doing so by spending thousands of dollars a year on everything from apparel to ecologically destructive cremations is just not sustainable—and should be discouraged, not encouraged, by the spiritual leaders of the world.
To be fair, this Buddhist monk is not alone in promoting pet ownership. Annually, many Christian Churches invite pets to be blessed,3 even if the Christian heaven is just for humans as animals have no souls. (A fun discussion of that hotly debated question, across many religious traditions, can be found here.4)
I admit this isn’t going to make the Gaian Way popular with pet owners! But just as Gaians should consider having smaller families for ecological reasons, they too should consider having fewer pets (if none, then at most one, or ideally a shared pet between a few families). Of course, not all pets are equal: small pets, those that produce food (like ducks and chickens), and those that play an important role in the household, such as service dogs, farm dogs, or guard geese—those are very different than pampered pets that become focal points of one’s consumptive love and surplus discretionary income.
These are not new critiques. Thorstein Veblen critiqued pet ownership as conspicuous consumption of the leisure class back in 1899! It was nearly as bad then, except that now a few billion people have enough excess wealth to own pets and the industry has grown to create more options on how to extract that money from pet owners (I mean, ‘pet parents.’).
‘So what, so what?,’ the defensive pet parent might say. ‘It’s my money, and my choice.’ But those are resources that could go to healing the planet, to helping those without enough, or simply reducing your work time so you have more time to connect with other people, with wild nature, or simply enjoy your own company and brief moment of conscious life.


My point of poking this hornet’s nest is two-fold. First: to religious leaders of all stripes: Don’t normalize excessive consumption simply to meet people where they’re at. Instead, these activities should at the least be questioned, including pet ownership. I recognize these issues will need to be brought up ever so gently or folks will pick a different church or temple to attend, but perhaps groups focused on religion and the environment, like Greenfaith and Interfaith Power & Light (pet ownership is absolutely a climate issue) could help create materials to make it easier for parish leaders to safely broach this uncomfortable topic.
Even in Gaians’ case, we in the community surely will have many perspectives on this topic, and many are pet owners, and justify this choice in various ways (such as saving that individual animal from euthanasia; bringing joy to the pet parent so that he or she can be happy and productive; and promising to keep unnecessary costs like doggy flights to a minimum). But overall, as a societal trend, total pet populations, like the growth economy, like the total populations of humans and livestock, must degrow if we are to prevent the far worse unplanned depopulation events on the horizon. And if spiritual leaders won’t remind folks of that hard truth, who will? Certainly not advertisers, elected politicians, or pet product companies (and probably not even friends as they don’t want to get on your bad side either!).
Second, to those who want pets as part of your life: 1) Consider strongly before getting a pet, and definitely a second or third. And if your mind is made up, err on the side of smaller. A small dog eats less than a big one, a rat can be cute, and eats very little at all!5 2) If you do have a pet, consider how many resources you’re going to devote to it. Dogs don’t need clothes or shoes, pet hotels, Prozac, or fancy toys. Life-saving medical care is a harder issue (and when it comes down to it, who wouldn’t give lifesaving medicine to their best friend if they could) but that reinforces the need to limit the number of pets in your life. If you know you won’t be able to resist spending thousands on polluting cancer treatments or other major interventions, limit your pets to one (or better, one shared with another family). And 3) Ideally, fill the void often filled with pets with time with friends, in nature, or perhaps volunteering with rehabilitated wildlife or even shelters for abandoned pets.
Now, I won’t be surprised if a lot of folks unsubscribe from the newsletter this week, but before you go, I just ask you to recognize that pets use a lot of resources. In a world where humans and their dependent species have displaced a colossal percentage of wild nature, don’t hide from the reality that like flying, eating meat, driving and the rest of consumer society’s worst behaviors, pet ownership is ecologically taxing and ethically nebulous. Now, you may unsubscribe. And if you head outside to blow off steam by taking your dog for a walk, please at least be present and don’t read texts or social media while spending time with your furry friend! Otherwise, what’s the point?

Endnotes
1) Eerily, this is very similarly to Saul’s Going Home scene in Soylent Green!
2) Part of me thinks this is a cynical ploy to prop up the participation in Buddhism (after all, all religious leaders now must sell their churches, no different than car companies and mobile phone providers) but more so, I think it reveals just how much pets have infected South Korean culture.
3) Ironically that day is typically the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, which typically is focused on prayers for animals and all of Creation. But pets have come to consume that space as well, with the focus more often on dogs and cats than endangered species or drying forests.
4) From a Gaian perspective, nothing has a soul. We all return to Gaia from whence we came and form new life, in an infinite cycle—just not a conscious one.
5) Also, if you are a cat owner, please leave it inside. Too many birds and small wildlife meet their demise from free ranging house cats and feral cats. Specifically: 1.3-4 billion birds and 6.3-22.3 billion mammals each year, according to this study in Nature Communications.
V. Amarnath
In later part of 1950s I grew up in a South Indian village of about one hundred families. Dogs, may be half a dozen roamed the streets and belonged to nobody. They knew well to do families and at dinner time waited in front of their houses. Also, houses with babies. When mothers fed the little ones showing the dog, they could claim the leftover.
Now I am in San Diego that is probably pet capital. Everyone pushes one, sometimes several digs. Petco is located here for a reason.
I am sure you are familiar with Dr Tim Morgan who asserts our discretionary wealth is going down rapidly. It will have an effect on pet ownership.
Krystal
I think it’s safe to say this paper is poking a hornets nest for sure. I’d go as far to say that this is no less a contentious issue than demographic degrowth, and I hold that the two are related – something which is touched on in the article, but which I feel perhaps deserves a fuller exploration and reflection.
While I agree with some of the underlying points of this, I feel the targeting is off, and that in some ways we are missing the wood for the trees.
* First and foremost – as this essay notes, people *are* adopting non-human companions as a “substitute” for having kids of their own, and this is a wonderful thing. Compared to the footprint of a raising an infant in the west, pets take far, far less, both in annual terms and over the course of their lives. If we wish to nurture and support demographic degrowth and reducing the footprint of human activity, then supporting something that has emerged as a cultural transition and support system for that change is something we should welcome.
* Conspicuous consumption with pets isn’t a product of pets themselves, but rather than humans cultures around them. Most dogs are perfectly content with companionship, catching a ball, chomping on a chicken carcass, and crashing on the couch. They are not asking for designer clothes and gadgets… This is the product of western consumerism. Remove the consumerism, not the dog.
* The majority of humans live in urban environments (esp. in Korea) and a pet might be the one of the few chances they have to come face to face with wider life in a relatable way. Perhaps we should emphasise that our concern is the need for simple living, for both human and non-human alike, rather than compromising one of the few bonds with the more-than-human world that people actively recognise and engage with. The more humans can be socialised to live alongside our sibling species (and ultimately to celebrate and embrace, rather than gloss over their differences to ourselves) the better, I feel.
* Dogs in particular hold a special relationship with our species. They are the only predatory carnivores to hold a fully domestic relationship with us, and their complex behavioural and psychological interaction with humans is unique. They are also by far the oldest domestic relationship we have, and there is strong evidence to suggest that the domestication process was mutual – that the modern human is a product of interaction with canines. We were domesticated by them too. Severing that bond should give us pause for thought. https://theconversation.com/canine-and-able-how-dogs-made-us-human-7394
So, ultimately I feel we must tackle the issue conspicuous consumption, not the companion animals we force such consumption onto. Such consumption can easily be tackled without cutting at those bonds.
“Buying” our dogs love and happiness with quality time and affection rather than gadgets and designer clothes is an obvious starting point that reduces consumption but also centres our relationships on a much more positive level – respecting and loving dogs and cats for who they are, not dolling them up as furry humans.