A Right to Breed? What Are You Smoking?

If you thought I was cranky this past week during my little-sleep, lots-of-work marathon, brace yourself. Crankiness overload ahead.

Breeders and other vigorous, indignant defenders of humans' "right" to own and use animals have found this site and this blog. If you pay attention to the comment threads, you already know this. And if you've participated in or paid attention to the recent threads on the Biden-and-his-dog posts specifically, you know the conversation about breeding and about shelter dogs (who apparently are just unpredictable mongrels you'll likely have to return, so you might as well not adopt them in the first place) has been getting heated. And I could have said the following in one of those threads, but I feel this topic warrants a post of its own.

Could we please look at the absurdity of the argument that humans have the "right"--and a "right" that some think needs to be defended as vigorously as the right to free speech or the right to take in oxygen--to "breed" animals? Really, manipulating another living being's reproduction, so that you can benefit from her pregnancy, is a right? Inserting yourself into, controlling, and exploiting one of the most private, personal events that any animal--the human kind included--experiences is a right? (And yes, I could just as easily be talking about what happens in the dairy industry and other animal ag here too.)

Even the way we talk about it is ridiculous--we "breed" animals. Although we, as members of an entirely different species, have no business being any part of the process at all, and this is supposed to be an act that's naturally their own, it has instead become something we do to them, in order to get from them what we want. They are things, things that we control, things without interests of their own, things with which we can do whatever we want. Except they're not.

Breeders take a living being, and they objectify her. She doesn't get pregnant and give birth to puppies. She is bred, and she produces puppies. Breeders and other staunch supporters of animal exploitation, including those who have made this blog and the AR section of Ideas for Change their new hangout, are working themselves into a frenzy over the fact that AR advocates want to strip them of their right--their right, damn it!--to exploit animals in the most personal, invasive of ways and to treat them like resources, like commodities.

More and more these days, I'm hearing and seeing battle cries about our rights! our rights! when it comes to human exploitation of animals. We've reached the point where anything we want to do, we claim we have a right to do. But you know what? Just saying it doesn't make it true.

I'm sure lots of you have something to say now too. Let the games begin.