Pet ownership is surging, with the number of pet cats and dogs outstripping the number of human children in countries from the US to Japan. Yet we rarely ask whether pet keeping is morally justifiable. Philosophers Angie Pepper and Richard Healey argue that it is not. Even owners who love their pets control almost every aspect of their lives, and they are kept primarily to serve these owners’ interests. We breed and raise pets to need us, manufacturing their vulnerability and stripping them of their ability to control their own lives. Without a justification for this power dynamic which appeals primarily to the interests of pets, rather than their owners, we should abolish pet keeping altogether.

Half of the world’s population lives with a pet, from cats, dogs and fish to birds, lizards, and guinea pigs. Our love of pets has reached the point that in nations as diverse as the US, the UK, Brazil, Japan, and Spain, the number of cats and dogs alone now significantly outstrips the number of human children. And our love of pets shows no signs of slowing. The global pet care industry was worth $259 billion in 2024 and is on track to hit $427 billion by 2032. Pet keeping is a central feature of modern family life.

We typically view the decision to bring a pet into our lives as a purely personal choice. So long as a person is capable of providing care and has no history of abuse, their right to animal companionship goes largely unquestioned. Yet, thinking about pet keeping in this way obscures important political and moral questions.

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Pet keeping involves huge asymmetries in power between pet owners and pets. Guardians determine more or less everything important about a pet’s life.

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It is widely agreed that the animals we keep as pets matter morally. After all, they are sentient creatures who experience things as going well or badly for them. They feel the pain of a broken leg and enjoy the pleasure of a delicious meal. Moreover, like all animals, pets are agents: they can act in the pursuit of their own preferences and goals. Consider, for instance, dogs playing together, or trying to find their favorite treats, cats hunting, gerbils constructing burrows, and rabbits grooming one another. All this means that pets have morally significant interests that we must consider when thinking about how they should be treated.

The interests of these animals are foundational to modern anti-cruelty legislation and fuel the public outrage that inevitably follows reports of abuse. Yet, a staggering disconnect remains between our recognition that these animals have morally significant interests and the daily reality of mistreatment and neglect that is alarmingly widespread. Besides acts of deliberate cruelty where animals are intentionally hurt, pets are often harmed in less deliberate, more insidious ways. Some are the victims of indifference, where owners simply don’t care very much about the animals they are responsible for. Obvious examples are the hamsters, rabbits, and goldfish purchased for children who have since grown disinterested in them. But even when owners deeply love their pets, they can nevertheless fail to satisfy even their most basic interests. For instance, they might provide an inadequate diet or fail to recognize the complex social needs of their companion—such as the fact that rabbits are social creatures who require the companionship of their own species, and so shouldn’t be kept alone in hutches.

Many pets also experience suffering long before they reach our homes. For example, there has been a rapid rise in puppy farms, which prioritize high-volume profit over the basic welfare interests of the animals. And the pursuit of aesthetic perfection in pedigree dogs has resulted in breeds that struggle to breathe or suffer from chronic joint pain due to their “designer” physical traits. The commodification of animals kept as pets also plays a role in the illegal trade of exotic wildlife, where animals are seized from their natural habitats only to either die in transit or face a slow decline in inadequate captive conditions.

One response to all this would be to advocate for improved education for pet owners, better legal protections, and more robust enforcement mechanisms. But we think that this response fails to address a prior question: What gives us the right to keep animals as pets in the first place?

SUGGESTED VIEWING In love with animals? With Peter Singer, Christopher Belshaw, Mary Ann Sieghart, Peter Egan, Myriam François

Pet keeping involves huge asymmetries in power between pet owners and pets. Guardians determine more or less everything important about a pet’s life: what and when they eat and drink, whether and when they can go outside or exercise, where they sleep, whether they socialize with conspecifics or other humans, whether they do or can reproduce, whether they receive medical treatment, and even when they are killed or euthanized. Importantly, the powers that guardians enjoy are granted, conditioned, and regulated by a complex network of legal and social norms that organize the practice and establish our expectations about pets and their place in the social world.

This suggests that, contrary to widespread assumption, pet keeping is not simply a matter of personal choice, but rather a social-political institution. By being positioned within this institution, pets are subject to organized power at both the domestic level (i.e., within the home) and political level (i.e., under state law). And, as we have observed, these relations of power have pervasive impacts on their lives from start to end.

For these reasons, the practice of pet keeping raises questions about political legitimacy. Very generally, questions of political legitimacy concern whether and why one individual or group is permitted to exercise power over others. For example, when we ask why the state has the right to pass laws through parliament and enforce those laws through the police and the courts, we are asking questions of political legitimacy. To be sure, the questions that arise in relation to our power over pets are not identical. Nevertheless, the extensive relations of power that obtain between humans and pets, and the significant impact that those relations have on the animals’ morally significant interests, mean that we must ask what justifies these relations of power: what explains why we are entitled to regulate every aspect of these animals’ lives and enforce our decisions upon them?

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Our power over pets systematically sets back their interests in exercising control and self-determination. While this aspect of animals’ wellbeing is frequently ignored, as embodied beings with agential capacities, animals have an important interest in self-determination.

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We believe that there are no satisfactory answers to these questions. In a recent article, we make this case by arguing that those animals positioned as pets have three moral complaints against the relations of power to which they are subject.

First, we argue that the power we hold and exercise over pets disrespects their moral independence. The guiding idea here is that all sentient creatures—humans and other animals alike—have their own life to live, and this fact places normative constraints on the way in which we can justify having power over another. To respect an individual’s moral independence, a good justification of power must appeal to the way in which relations of power will benefit the subject of power rather than the ruler. For instance, we do not believe that the power held by parliamentarians and prime ministers can be justified by the fact that it serves their interests (even though it might well do so). Rather, if it is to be justified, these relations of power must be justified by the fact that they benefit the members of the community over whom politicians exercise power.

However, when we consider the reasons that we have for keeping pets, and the relations of power that pet-keeping involves, these almost exclusively appeal to our own interests. For instance, we may want a dog to keep us company, to get us out of the house and exercise, to make us feel safe at night, or to teach our children about responsibility, love, and death. But these kinds of justification all fail to respect the moral independence of these animals, because they focus on the way in which these relations of power will serve our own interests. To avoid disrespecting these animals’ moral independence, any justification for maintaining the relations of power inherent to the institution of pet keeping would need to be grounded in the interests of the pets themselves.

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By subjecting pets to our power, they become dependent on us for the satisfaction of their most basic needs and interests..

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One might argue that the power we exercise over pets is justified by their interests precisely because these animals are dependent on us for their survival and wellbeing. But this ignores why pets are in this position in the first place, namely, because we choose to bring them into our homes. So, while we are certainly morally required to care for the pets that we currently live with (as well as those languishing in shelters and rescue shelters), we cannot use their dependency to justify the maintenance of the institution of pet keeping itself.

This brings us to our second complaint: Our power over pets systematically sets back their interests in exercising control and self-determination. While this aspect of animals’ wellbeing is frequently ignored, as embodied beings with agential capacities, animals have an important interest in self-determination. That is to say, they have significant interests in exercising control over their own bodies, actions, and environment. However, as we have already said, humans determine what pets can and cannot do across all dimensions of their lives. This ranges from our control over basic movement and space (e.g., whether they are locked in a room or confined in a cage), to reproductive control, and the possibility and nature of their social interactions. This all runs roughshod over an individual’s interests in self-determination.

Third, pet keeping involves a complaint of manufactured vulnerability. By subjecting pets to our power, they become dependent on us for the satisfaction of their most basic needs and interests. Their dependency is further exacerbated by humans selectively breeding them over successive generations to possess “desirable” traits, such as friendliness and docility. For these reasons, pets are vulnerable to serious risks of harm because, as we have seen, their caregivers may be cruel, neglectful, or otherwise unable to identify and provide adequate care. Yet subjecting others to serious risks of harm without compelling reason is normally morally objectionable. For example, if I throw rocks from a cliff edge for fun, and by doing so I risk hitting and harming beachgoers below, then the beachgoers have a moral objection to my conduct (even if I do not hit them). Likewise, in the case of pet keeping, we subject individual animals to serious risks of harm primarily for our own pleasure and enjoyment. This grounds a significant moral complaint against our conduct. After all, if we compare the current situation to a situation in which we do not breed or keep pets, the apparent necessity of subjecting them to these risks of harm disappears.

To recap, by subjecting animals to severely asymmetrical relations of power, we disrespect their moral independence, thwart their interests in self-determination, and subject them to serious risks of harm. These features of our relationship all ground moral complaints that undermine the legitimacy of these relations of power. As this suggests, the problem with keeping animals as pets is not just that they are the victims of violence, mistreatment, and neglect (though regrettably many are). Rather, the problem is also with the relations of power that obtain between pets, human guardians, and the wider political community. Consequently, we believe that the standard focus on improving animal welfare or preventing overt abuse is insufficient, as it leaves the underlying power dynamics intact.

What does this mean for the future of pet keeping? Well, in the absence of good answers to the complaints of animals kept as pets, the power relations inherent to the practice of keeping pets are illegitimate. When a social institution is built on illegitimate power, it is fundamentally unjust, and we have a moral obligation to dismantle unjust systems rather than simply manage them. This gives us a strong reason to abolish the institution altogether.