“The Ethicist,” whom I have not harassed for a while, a.k.a Ariel Kaminer, handles this week an odd query from a woman who has been asked by an elderly friend to pledge to euthanize her dog after she dies. Kaminer, as she often does, makes the issue more complicated than it is and muddles things by implying some kind of inconsistency on the part of pet owners who find the request unethical but who will dine on cooked animal flesh this evening. She even had to consult Peter Singer, the controversial Princeton ethicist, about whether an animal has a “right to life.”

Every living thing has a right to life, and also a right to live, which is why eating other animals as humans have evolved to do is not incontrovertibly  unethical. Killing an animal just because you can, or because it makes you happy, or because you have convinced yourself that it wants to die when in fact it doesn’t, however, is incontrovertibly unethical. Continue reading →