Human Rights For Canines

We need a new religion, quick!!

I don’t know if it happening to you, too, but I am starting to notice it all right around me (this morning most recently).

You ask someone about his family and this person answers by including a pet in the family.

Now, this is something which has, in a way, always been done. Fido, or Felix, are part of the family because they live with it, in the same way as the au pair is said to be part of the family with the obvious, unspoken proviso that she actually isn’t. I am not talking about this.

What I am talking about is this kind of in-your-face “the family has three people, my wife, myself, and Fido” attitude, where it is clear that the pet is not merely a pet, but a full family member endowed with human rights.

It seems to me that this attitude is ripe among couples without children. Their dog is their child. Therefore, the dog must be promoted to the rank of human. This makes the couple forget that they actually did not want to undergo the inconvenience, expense, worry and perhaps sorrow of having a child, whilst posing as loving carers and, actually, parents in the eyes of the world.

This carries more consequences, which the “parents” will , rather likely, fully embrace.

If a dog is as much worth as a human, it will be cruel to slaughter cows, because at that point how can you humanise some animals and not others? Cue the army of vegetarians and vegans to whom Jesus must have had, at the very least, outdated views, not sufficiently reflective of the suffering he inflicted on those creatures.

In addition, if a dog is as much worth as a human, abortion becomes clearly a possibility; because you see, a baby becomes something you elect to have, or not, according to your life situation. The more sinister variation of this as also logical: let’s kill the unwanted baby and let’s get a dog from the shelter instead.

See what I am doing here? Saving a life! Yeah well, I caused another life to go. But hey, isn’t it a zero sum, of sort? Let’s kill Unwanted Baby Number Two, then. This time, we might get a poodle…

The theological implications are also vast. It being, at this point, simply inconceivable that Fido might not experience some sort of Beatific Vision (this would be, and I am not joking here, dogphobic), it follows that Christianity must be exclusionary. Therefore, the first Oriental fad that becomes fashionable in Fido’s circle of friends (see what I am doing here?) and promises a sort of Dog Nirvana where nobody is “left behind” and everything is “sacred” in the same way, will be readily adopted, particularly if it produced a most desired answer concerning not only the dog, but the aborted child, too.

There will likely be more ramifications than these ones here, because the desire to give human dignity to animals must create all sort of absurdities. Is the milk cow my slave? Is training a dog coercion? Do I have the right to live where bears using to roam freely?

You may laugh reading this; which would be consoling, because it would mean that, in your circle of friends, there are a lot of sensible people.

But I can assure you that the number of those who equiparate a dog to a human is growing steadily, and no sign of abatement.

I hope Pius XIII, if he comes up with the right ideas instead of only the right name, will be very vocal about this.

We need to recover proper Christianity before we start standing up for God.