People and Their Pets

Here is an interesting exercise in ethical behavior developed by some very devious scientists.  It’s usually referred to as the trolley problem.  Here’s how Time framed it up a few years ago.  “Imagine you are a train-yard operator who sees an out-of-control boxcar running down a track that five workers are repairing. The workers won’t have time to get out of the way unless you flip a switch to change the car to another track. But another worker is on the second track. You have just seconds to make a decision: let the five workers die – or kill the one. What do you do?”  This is a challenging dilemma, even as a hypothetical.

The utilitarian answer is to pull the switch, similar to the decision of Mr. Spock in the movie “Star Trek II” (1982) – “Do not grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh...the needs of the few…or the one.”  About 90% make this choice.  The rest opt not to intervene letting the natural course of events play out.  But no action is also a choice.

Now let’s shift the scenario slightly to one I find very disturbing.  Instead of a train or trolley we have a bus bearing down on a man and a dog.  You can save only one of them.  Researchers asked this question of 573 participants in 2013.  They were “forced to decide whether to save humans or pets from imminent death. The level of relationship between the human shifted six times (foreign tourist, hometown stranger, distant cousin, best friend, grandparent, or sibling), while relationship to the pet had two levels (your pet, someone else's pet). Willingness to save a pet over a human consistently decreased as level of relationship between the participant and the human in the scenario increased.

Here are a few examples.  Some chose the dog over a sibling (1%), over a grandparent (2%) over a distant cousin (16%) and over a foreigner (26%).  More than one-quarter valued the life of a dog over the life of a fellow human being, the nondescript stranger!  Furthermore, 46% of women would save their own dog rather than a foreign tourist.  To me that is mindboggling.  

We love our pets.  Many treat them as part of the family, pampering our “furry children” with organic food, spa treatments, vacations and top-of-the-line healthcare.  And how about those who would pay tens of thousands of dollars for a cloned replica of their deceased best friend.  People have protested about being forced to let their neighbors take the place of their dog in a tornado shelter.  But we need to get some perspective along with some critical thinking.  A dog or cat has a shorter life span than humans so the grief will come, but after a reasonable period the pet is replaceable.  Much of the attachment comes from the human side, especially the tendency to attribute human thoughts and feeling to other species – often based on their attractiveness.  (As I’ve said before, if mosquitos had fur and big eyes, we would be shamed for swatting them.)

But Americans do value pets and other Americans over foreigners.  Perhaps that’s why when 305 people are killed in Egypt, the headline hardly raises an eyebrow and is quickly superseded by another sexual harassment scandal or another American in distress.  It explains how we could so easily ignore the Rwandan genocide in 1994 with the slaughter of over 10,000 men, women and children per day for over three months.  At that time the economy was beginning to boom and all seemed well; and today we are too busy looking at pictures of cute kittens and puppies on social media (and on the network news as well) to care about such things.

Pets are not human, and now the pet-owning 2/3 of the population gets to hate me for pointing this out – oh, well.