Dogs aren’t people

One of my hottest takes

It’s not “All Mammals Are Created Equal” (Photo by: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

For much of my life, I was a real dog hater. I got over this eventually, largely because when my son was little, he loved petting and playing with the random dogs we would meet. Now that he’s older, we even agreed to let him dogsit for a family friend. Despite his solemn commitments to do the necessary dog-walking and other care, I ended up taking quite a few walks with this dog, and I really bonded with her and enjoyed our time out and about. So I’m truly not a hater now; I get it.

Dogs are friendly and affectionate and, of course, like human children, have literally co-evolved with humans to charm us into wanting to give them food and take care of them.

That being said, dogs are not people.

“Pet parent” is fine as a metaphor, but dogs already have parents and their parents are other dogs. A human parent would have human children.

Humans, both adult and child, also have human rights. These rights do not extend to dogs, who are not human. And similarly, while dog owners certainly have human rights, those rights are centered on their own rights as humans, not on their relationships to their dogs.

On one level, I think this is a fairly uncontroversial claim. But on another level, I think there’s a lot of confusion about this. There are 22 states, for example, that have chosen to preempt local government authority to enact “breed-specific legislation.”

This is anti-discrimination law for dogs.

Now, possibly people see this as just a question of where it’s appropriate to locate legislative authority over canine issues. But Colorado passed a law that “makes it unlawful for homeowners’ insurance companies to discriminate against specific dog breeds.” They also capped how much landlords are allowed to charge in pet deposits — rent control for dogs! And the D.C. Council passed “Roscoe’s Law,” a kind of comprehensive set of fair housing measures for dogs.

This all strikes me as badly under-theorized, and it only really makes sense if you don’t understand that there’s a difference between a pet and a person.

Discrimination is a human rights issue

If a landlord says “I’m not renting to a Black family,” that is illegal.

And not to get too galaxy brained about it, but the basic idea here is that it’s a violation of human dignity to be discriminated against in this way.