Animal Person
On Dominance and Animal Birth Control

Posted: 24 Apr 2009 04:41 AM PDT

Yesterday, regarding being a minority within a minority, mikey commented (among other things):

While I am fairly new subscriber to this blog, therefore not knowing your particular stance, I've often felt like a minority within a minority for my stance on animal birth control. When taking the issue to simplest common denominator, spaying/neutering is essentially exercising human dominance over non-human animals.

mikey, my stance can be seen in the posts about Project Treadstone (and if you type Project Treadstone into the Google Search box just below my half-blind, diabetic greyhound, Violet Rays, on the right, you'll get a dozen more posts).

But my stance is also categorized under Gray Matters because, in my perfect world, we wouldn't be spaying or neutering anybody. Meanwhile, I would love to be able to have some kind of law against human beings producing/reproducing more than one person per person. We are a far bigger problem on this planet than the (over)population of feral cats, elephants, Canada geese, or any other creature we "manage" or want to manage, "humanely" or otherwise.

But alas, we' re too important and special to "manage," and every human pregnancy is treated as a sacred, blessed event, while we kill the kittens inside pregnant feral cats every day without batting an eyelash, and in fact we're relieved when we can catch one who's pregnant, as that's x number of cats who don't have to come into this world.

How contradictory is that?

So mikey, I agree with you in theory. Yes, sterilizing someone--anyone--without their consent is an act of dominance. However, I don't think (and as you allude to) the situation is black and white. (Hence, it's a Gray Matter.) In my experience there are at least a handful of issues that involve compromise when the idea of veganism collides with real life. And this is one of them. We are making a decision for sentient beings that we think will be better for both populations. And when the option is rounding them up and killing them, TNR looks like an especially attractive option.

But who cares about me? What do you all think?