I’m surprised that so few states have such laws: even with Pennsylvania joining the fold, it will only be four. I’m not surprised that I have read so many headlines in conservative media deliberately misinterpreting the bill. “Pennsylvania To Pass Law Giving Animals the Rights of Humans,” one read. “Dogs to Be Treated as Sentient Beings in Quaker State” read another. These are deceitful headlines, but as they used to say, “What else is new?” Several sources declared the law to be a slippery slope, allowing PETA crazies to get their way by making various forms of “animal labor” illegal while making veganism mandatory. That is a more justified position, but a basic ethical principle is not to hesitate to do the right thing because some may exploit the change to do the wrong thing.
Good for Pennsylvania. I can’t see an ethical argument against this measure.
Ethics Alarms 
Meanwhile, in NYC, there’s a bill to make having dogs indoors illegal. Because, apparently, Muslims consider dogs to be unclean. I want to ask if they mean unhygienic or spiritually unclean.
I cannot find any evidence of this bill in NYC (or NY). Do you have a source?
Perhaps it originated with this: Mamdani ally, Nerdeen Kiswani, said dogs should be banned as indoor pets in New York City because they’re “unclean & unIslamic”.
Probably. I can’t find anything either. I may have fallen for an inaccurate headline. It’s just hard not to believe this stuff now.
The conservative press and “new media’ is as unreliable as the Axis media. Verdict: true. Now what?
I wish I knew, man.
Given the dogs/muslims thing going on, that’s the story I expected you to write about. Anyway, this one is better.
Just curious, what did your wife think of A Dog’s Purpose?
She was so sick, depressed and miserable at that point that I couldn’t get her to watch it all the way through, because dogs dying always upset her.
I’m kind of surprised that this didn’t come up sooner.
The interesting situations will arise when the animals have more than nominal value, my first thought was to “pet” horses or something like that, but really… There are dogs out there that cost thousands if you’re picky about the breed.
I’m not sure I’ve ever recovered from reading “Old Yeller” as a twelve year old.
When I first started reading this piece, I was thinking our host was going to come down on the side of opposing the idea. I actually found most of the proposals quite reasonable and – given how pets are dearly loved by their owners in the vast majority of cases – logical. AS it turns out, I ended up agreeing with our host.
I do NOT think animals – even cherished pets – rise to the level of a human being. They are animals…we are not. And I type that as a person who still thinks about Bailey almost every day and misses her every time I do. But because animals are higher on the scale of importance than a piece of furniture or jewelry or the Jeep in the garage, they should get more consideration than those things in divorce proceedings.