Up for adoption

How do we reconcile the social unacceptability of loving one's pets - as described somewhat convincingly by philosophy professor Kelly Oliver - with the relatively new societal fixation on dog rescue?

When I was growing up, if you saw a cute dog and asked where the owner had found it, the answer was usually "Pets on Lex" - a posh pet store. The more dedicated or car-owning or ruddy-country-club-going sorts may have gone to a breeder in Ohio. Only the very animal-rights-oriented, the very canine-knowledgeable would, if they could afford otherwise, go to the pound. Fast-forward to today. When we took our breeder-bred Bisou into NY, a woman in front of Zabars (the New Yorker cartoons sketch themselves) asked us, "Is she a rescue?" in this way that suggested she merely assumed that anyone her-sort-of-people would surely not have gone any other route. It seems of a piece with the shift towards finding it socially unacceptable to eat vegetables out of season or from Peru. The kind of thing where you know not everyone, not even in Park Slope or whatever, is walking the walk, but it becomes taboo to openly do otherwise, and highly encouraged to ostentatiously demonstrate if you're in line.

Given the number of such incidents I've experienced, as well as read about, as well as other clues it would take too long to go into, I do wonder whether dog "rescue" is perhaps both a real thing and, in other cases, a kind of side industry to regular dog breeding, given the availability of expensive but not as expensive purebred puppies sold to those who prefer a dose of sad-and-pathetic with their cute. That this happens sometimes seems clear enough; the question is how often.

On the other hand, the near-impossibility of actually qualifying for a "rescue" suggests that what's going on is more that as sensitivity to this issue increases in the population at large (as with Whole Foods now being a popular supermarket, whereas once health-food stores were a niche thing), it becomes possible for whichever entities decide who qualifies to be incredibly picky. If we had seriously tried to adopt a rescue, I can think offhand of probably a dozen reasons we would not have qualified, none of which in any way relates to our ability to properly care for a dog. Bisou is cared for and then some. A neighbor who sees me walking her all the time called me "dedicated." Bisou, remember this the next time you're yapping because I abandoned you... for ten minutes to go take a shower.

Perhaps the way to reconcile Kelly Oliver's op-ed and Rescue Culture is that "rescue" has itself become a if not the primary socially-acceptable reason for pet ownership. Few can swing a "service animal" claim, as vs. an "I saved this living being from death" one. "Rescue" is a way of getting around the fundamental selfishness of owning a pet, of putting resources into a non-human creature, when (as goes the killjoy argument whenever pets come up) so many humans are suffering. It stops being about a human wanting the companionship of an affectionate and amusing fluffy animal, but starts to be about walking the walk in support of a cause.