What do words mean? What is ownership? What is property? If you have a dog or a cat, are you the owner?

Maybe not.

There's a growing movement to remove words like "pet" and "owner" and replace them with the legal term "guardian."

Before you laugh at what might appear to be mere semantics of interest to no one except activist windbags who love hearing themselves prattle on till the wee hours at city commission hearings, consider that this word change is already a fait accompli via legislation which has been passed in many places, including:

- Sherwood, AR,
- innumerable California cities including Albany, Berkeley, 28 cities in Marin County, San Francisco, Sebastopol, and West Hollywood
- Boulder, CO
- Amherst, MA
- St. Louis, MO
- Wanaque, NJ
- the entire state of Rhode Island
- Menomonee Falls, WI

The University of Pennsylvania's Susan I. Finkelstein has written an article titled "High Noon for Animal Rights Law: The Coming Showdown Between Pet Owners and Guardians" which should raise more eyebrows than it has. (Here's a backup link to the same story.) Among other things, Finkelstein warns:

Taking the “pet guardian” issue to its logical conclusion, many critics believe the elimination of property status for pets will ultimately result in the elimination of keeping companion animals at all. Animals themselves, they conclude, would suffer the most from the good intentions of animal rightists.

Obviously, a central concern of veterinarians is that this will drive up the cost of veterinary practice. But long term, the idea is to work towards elimination of the keeping of animals by man in any way shape or form. This has long been a central philosophical goal of the animal rights movement (as distinguished from the animal welfare movement). A perfect example of this philosophy is this 1993 statement by Wayne Pacelle (no fringe loony BTW; he's the current President of the Humane Society of the United States):

"One generation and out. We have no problem with the extinction of domestic animals. The are creations of human selective breeding."

"We have no ethical obligation to preserve the different breeds of livestock produced through selective breeding."

[Wayne Pacelle, Senior Vice-President of HSUS, formerly of Friends for Animals; Quoted in Animal People, May, 1993]

What's fascinating about this is that the animals haven't been consulted about their right to breed (a right they don't have, but to which I devoted a long essay) or even their right to life. What sort of "guardian" advocates extinction of his wards?

The American Kennel Club's Dr. James Holt thinks the problem stems from confusion, in that ordinary animal lovers believe that "animal rights" activists are people like themselves, but more passionate. They couldn't be more wrong. From a speech titled "Could canis familiaris be the next endangered species?"

When I start talking about the animal rights extremists, most people are totally unaware that pet ownership is one of their targets. Many people know of the animal rights opposition to fur and leather, many are aware of the opposition to hunting, or at least to certain forms of hunting, some know about the animal rights opposition to animal agriculture, or at least to veal, and a few know about the animal rights opposition to the use of animals in medical and biological research.

While many people are aware of these targets of the animal rights movement, most ordinary people do not feel immediately threatened by the extremists, because research, agriculture and even hunting and fur are things that are removed from the daily experience of most people. But the general population is almost totally unaware of the animal rights opposition to pet ownership. Even many dog owners, fanciers and breeders don't understand the animal rights movement's position on pet ownership. If they have any awareness about it at all, they assume the opposition is to 'puppy mills' or dog fighting or animal cruelty. Most pet owners, and even many members of the purebred dog fancy, assume that the organizations we know as the animal rights movement are made up of animal lovers more or less just like them, albeit perhaps a bit more zealous. They are shocked to learn that the radical animal rights movement opposes the mere keeping of a pet as "animal fascism." Most of my purebred dog colleagues have never heard the term natural dog – the term animal rights activists use to refer to what we call mutts, and their dismissal of purebred dogs as "unnatural" dogs.

Actually, even mutts are bad, as the entire species we call Canis familiaris is man's creation, and was bred for centuries in violation of the animal rights philosophy.

In other words, dogs are unnatural creatures. There should be no such animal. Eliminating breeding of purebred dogs is only a first step (along with neutering all dogs, of course) towards a world of no domesticated dogs.

While it's very tough to get real statistics (a fact that always works to the benefit of activists), I see increasing evidence that there's been such a dramatic reduction in the canine population that adoption agencies are using new methods to come up with adoptable dogs:

Nationwide, studies show that during the last 30 years shelter intakes and euthanasias have decreased by 70-90 percent or more in many cities, particularly those located on the east and west coasts. One consequence of this remarkable development is a steep decline in the number of shelter dogs available for adoption in many parts of the country. In order to deal with their newfound success, some shelters and rescue groups have had to realign their efforts, sometimes with surprising results.

Faced with fewer small dogs and puppies to offer the public, a handful of shelters and organizations have swapped their traditional mission for a new bottom line strategy aimed at filling consumer demands. Simply stated, they have become pet stores. Some are importing stray dogs across state lines and from foreign countries to maintain an inventory of adoptable dogs.

A future without canis familiaris? Instead only wild dogs for us to contemplate -- from a respectful distance?

No! I refuse to submit to this nonsense.

Whether they're mutts or purebred, dogs are uniquely ours. They're both animals and part of what we are as human beings. Those who work against this symbiotic relationship are neither friends of animals nor of human civilization.

MORE: Readers who keep birds should read this.

MORE: Interesting Randian analysis of "animal rights" by Russell Madden:

Rand defines a right as: "A 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life." ("Man's Rights," p. 93.) She goes on to point out that rights pertain only to actions, that is, to the freedom to act; it is a freedom from direct or indirect "physical compulsion, coercion, or interference by other" people. For the individual, a right is a positive: it is a freedom to act. For others, "rights impose no obligations...except of a negative kind": to refrain from violating the rights of another.

Animals do not need nor are they capable of using ethics. They do not need to discover the proper behaviors required for their individual existences. Those actions have been programmed genetically through the process of evolution. They therefore do not have anything needing to be protected by rights in a social context.

Ethics and morality are applicable only to beings who possess a volitional, conceptual, rational consciousness. Since rights are an extension of ethics/morality, they are therefore applicable only to such beings possessing free will, and, more specifically, only to individual people. Only the rights of the individual exist: there are no gay rights or women's rights or Black rights or handicapped rights or the rights of the unborn.

MORE: A chilling look at how the word "guardian" will be used.