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An independent life was never in the cards for these pets. If they couldn't be kept in shoebox apartments, they'd never have been bred and sold in the first place, or if they were, they'd be put down.
The question is whether these docile animals that loaf around apartments all day would be better off never having existed, not whether they'd be better off in the Hundred Acre Woods.
But we have domesticated dogs to our requirements. I see people posting online with dog breeds that are descended from working animals and that need space and lots of exercise, and if they aren't in an apartment, they have a tiny patch of backyard.
I don't think those people should be permitted to keep anything bigger than a goldfish or a lizard or similar, but they are also the ones gushing about being "petmoms" or "petdads" and would be in line with Ms. Nussbaum about our duties to animals.
It is irony, that they keep animals as pets in ways that suit the convenience of the human owner but spout all the animal rights arguments and may indeed be part of the vegan movement that pushes that eating meat is cruelty and murder and all the rest of it. Tell me this looks like normal behaviour for a dog. Or this is the natural environment for this breed. (If the dog in that second one snapped and lunged for the stupid owner, I wouldn't blame it one bit, but the dog would then be put down as a dangerous animal when it's not its fault for acting according to its nature).
If they're being kept like this? Better off never to have existed. And that's just the creatures we've bred to live with us, not talking about the wild animals in the Hundred Acre Woods that the call is being made to interfere with how they live and turn them into zoo exhibits or pets as well.
That's entirely my point. We don't keep wild dogs as pets, so there are no dogs that would be wild but for our domestication. Daydreaming that the fat beagle lounging in the apartment all day has been deprived his romp in the Hundred Acre Woods is folly, because that option was never in the cards for that beagle. At best, he never would have existed in the first place.
Fair position, albeit one I don't agree with. But they still haven't been "deprived of their own independent lives."
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