I’ll Have the Burger Deluxe, With a Side of Guilt

Since its inception in the mid-1970s, the animal rights movement seems to have succeeded, more than any of us might have expected, in changing the way we view animals.

The latest indications of this change made news earlier this summer when animal rights activists lobbied the Los Angeles City Council to replace the term pet “owner” with pet “guardian” in local codes. Because language shapes thought and vice versa, this kind of semantic activism is certainly a way to temper human “speciesism.” But does it really mean we are starting to see animals as more than brutes, or is it just a token gesture to make us feel better?

Evidence abounds, after all, that we are treating our pets differently than we did 25 years ago, a phenomenon that has not escaped the notice of hawkish marketing teams at pet superstores. Petsmart, for example, is a behemoth chain that operates more than 560 outlets across the United States and Canada. Despite the strains that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks put on businesses, the company made a profit this year. Its strategy for market dominance, according to its investor relations Web site, is “to target the ‘pet enthusiast’ [who is] ... passionately committed to his/her pet(s), values services and premium products, is brand loyal and insensitive to price.”

According to the American Animal Hospital Assn., 37% of pet owners talk to their pets on the phone or leave messages on their answering machines meant for the pets to hear in their absence, and 75% of pet owners say they would go into debt to keep their pets healthy--one reason why pet insurance is more popular than ever.

But all of this increased coddling of and spending on pets haven’t translated into a significant shift in our attitudes toward animals in general. Perhaps the most telling indication of this is the fact that, according to the Vegetarian Resource Group, the number of vegetarians in this country has remained stable at a minuscule 1% since the late 1970s.

While more people are eating tofu dogs and veggie burgers (increasingly available in mainstream supermarkets), the driving force behind this trend seems to be a desire for healthy menu alternatives, not a conscientious renunciation of meat.

So how do we square this blithe acceptance of animal slaughter for profit with the sometimes extreme lengths to which more and more of us will gladly go to ensure not just the physical but the emotional well-being of our pets? We don’t, and that may be exactly why we’re all such neurotic “pet enthusiasts.”

We aren’t oblivious to the compelling argument that animal rights guru Peter Singer made in his 1975 book “Animal Liberation”: “If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans?”

Yet we’re still eating meat, buying leather and going to the circus and the zoo. It’s just that now we’re feeling guilty about it, which is probably why we’re all obsessively watching the pet psychic on the Animal Planet channel.

As a devotee of the Atkins diet and a doting mommy of three cats, I am, to be sure, one of the worst offenders--which is why I applaud efforts to rename us “guardians” of our pets. They make me feel better while I’m trying to find the conviction and discipline to start eating green.

But they don’t make me any less of a hypocrite.