Welcome Home: An Animal Rights Perspective on Living with Dogs & Cats

For the vast majority of people, the bond they share with their dog or cat companion is a familial one, born of love and mutual affection. Indeed, interspecies relationships in the world are not rare and they are relationships that humans generally celebrate as evidence of the interconnectedness and beauty of life on Earth. But according to the loudest voices in the American animal rights movement today, such relationships are incompatible with the rights of animals when one of the parties is a human being. Living with companion dogs and cats is, according to this view, a "necessary evil" at best; at worst, it is a relationship between "master" and "slave" and those animals would be better off if they did not exist at all. With the belief that the "solution" to all dog and cat suffering lies in their eventual extinction, the contemporary animal rights movement not only preaches that the lives of dogs and cats are dispensable, their deliberate elimination of no moral consequence, their disappearance from our planet no tragedy to mourn, it embraces an agenda to which no other rights-based movement in history has ever subscribed: the deliberate annihilation of those it has pledged to protect. Welcome Home explores the dangers to animals posed by this misanthropic, pro-extinction position, challenging the logical fallacies, factual inaccuracies, and ethical compromises upon which it is based. In its place, Welcome Home offers an alternative animal rights philosophy, an optimistic and hopeful approach which champions the rights of dogs and cats to the many emotional, physical, and evolutionary advantages conferred by their cohabitation with humans, but, most important of all, the right to their very existence.