News

Dogs Are the Best! But They Highlight Our Hypocrisy.

Aug. 3, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET

By Nicholas Kristof

New York Times Opinion Columnist

Over the past couple of decades, dogs have evolved into humans.

Well, at least that’s how we think of them now. Some 97 percent of Americans consider dogs (or other pets) part of their families. A majority of dog owners celebrate canine birthdays, and nearly two-thirds report that they take more photos of their dogs than of family members.

If you’re dating someone with a dog, bring a biscuit: A majority of dog owners say they would consider ending a relationship if the pet disapproved of the partner.

America now has more dogs than children, and households are spending lavishly on pets. Warning that dogs may suffer storm anxiety, one company offers canine noise-canceling headphones for $200. Dog people spend thousands of dollars on oil paintings of Rover, not to mention large sums on dog spas, dog restaurants, dog bakeries and dog fashion.

“When your pooch is wearing clothes from Dog & Co., you know they’re going to be part of the most fashionable pack in town,” one site explains.

Then there are high-end dog foods and sophisticated health services and, if the chemotherapy doesn’t succeed, pet cemeteries. Because people don’t want to be separated from their pets, the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery outside New York City says that it has accommodated more than 800 people who asked to be buried with their pets.

I understand all this. Our last dog, Katie Kuvasz Kristof, was a saint (but not to squirrels), and if Pope Francis is right about dogs going to heaven, Katie is now barking in paradise. There are a few statues of heroic dogs around the world — in Tokyo, in New York City, in Scotland — and in the United States I would love to see more. Perhaps we could replace some statues of Confederate generals with ones of dogs who represented a higher standard of, er, humanity?

Still, the point of this column isn’t to highlight why dogs are the best people, but rather to highlight our hypocrisy: While we increasingly pamper our dogs, we blithely accept the torture of pigs.

Just as today we wonder how people like Thomas Jefferson could have been so morally obtuse as to own and abuse slaves, our own descendants will look back at us and puzzle over how 21st-century humans could have tolerated factory farming and the systematic abuse of intelligent mammals, including hogs.

“Farmed animals are just as capable of experiencing joy, social bonds, pain, fear and suffering as the animals we share our homes with,” Leah Garcés, the president of Mercy for Animals, told me. “The level of cruelty and disregard for their welfare that is endemic to industrial animal agriculture is nothing short of a moral atrocity.”

I’ve given up eating meat from farmed animals, partly because of personal experience: The hogs we raised on our farm when I was growing up were smart, sometimes ornery and equipped with very different personalities. In their variety, they reminded me of my human friends.

Yet pigs are mostly invisible to us before they end up as sausages on a plate, so we typically ignore their suffering.

Female pigs often spend nearly all their adult lives confined to coffin-size pens so narrow that they cannot turn around. They don’t go outside, touch soil, see the sky or exercise.

“Smart, social and playful, sows will demonstrate resistance when first confined (screaming and bar chewing),” the Kirkpatrick Foundation writes in a recent report about industrial hog production. “Distress eventually gives way to despondency: A 3-year-old pregnant sow rarely responds to a nudge or dousing of water.”

In a nutshell, we indulge dogs and abuse hogs. A dog is neutered by a vet under anesthesia. A pig in an industrial hog barn often has his scrotum slit without anesthetic by a farmhand who then yanks out each testicle.

Someone mistreats a dog and we’ll call 911. But if a company tortures millions of hogs as a business model, we dine on its products, invest in its shares and honor its executives.

“The discrepancy is so stark,” Peter Singer, a moral philosopher, told me. “People are horrified by the very idea of eating dogs, but pigs are just as intelligent and make fine companions, too.”

Singer notes that when meatpacking plants closed during the pandemic, at least 240,000 hogs were euthanized by raising temperatures to 130 degrees so that the animals perished from the heat. While some 31 states have laws making it illegal to leave a dog in a hot car or provide immunity to a person who rescues such a dog, it’s fine to torture and kill pigs in that way.

Crystal Heath, a veterinarian who co-founded a group called Our Honor, which addresses animal rights, told me that the mistreatment of livestock weighs on many veterinarians.

Gas chambers for unwanted dogs are being phased out from animal shelters, she said, while more gas chambers have been installed in hog barns to kill pigs — using carbon dioxide, which (as I’ve written) appears to amount to torturing animals to death.

It’s true that we also tolerate cruelty to dogs when it’s out of sight. Some research labs sometimes confine dogs in small cages in ways that are unconscionable.

Yet in general we draw a distinction between dogs and farm animals that is difficult to find a moral basis for. Americans were upset by Koreans and Chinese eating dogs (South Korea this year passed a law that will abolish the trade in dog meat), but it’s not obvious why dining on dogs is ethically more problematic than eating bacon. (Sorry, Katie!)

These are the moral contradictions we live with, and I think we tolerate them only because we don’t reflect on them. So let’s reflect.

We have created a system of industrial agriculture that is exceptionally good at producing cheap meat, but only because it systematically abuses livestock. Are we really OK with that trade-off?