Pet loves, rants, and raves: Commentary on Downey and Ellis's article

Downey and Ellis's article about the acquisition of cats is timely. Across Western nations, the popularity of pet ownership is steadily increasing. Industry figures show that this trend strongly reflects high as well as low involvement household-purchase decisions. Reasons for the upswing are unclear. A cogent explanation is that increases in divorce, separation, and single households mean that more consumers seek companionship and/or a sense of family via pet ownership. Other explanations warrant additional investigation. Do absent parents substitute pets as socialising agents for their children? Are modern parents susceptible to the Paris-Hilton effect? What is the role of pets in the psychological and physical health of the elderly? Do consumers use pets to enact multiple identities and resolve identify conflicts? An important question looms large. Why do business researchers neglect the examination of animals as consumer products and co-producers of leisure activities? Perhaps they(we?) are reluctant to acknowledge “another inconvenient truth”; the role of (wo)man's will to power in the devastating, possibly unethical, treatment of animals. Elizabeth Costello, the fictional animal rights activist in J.M. Coetzee's Coetzee J.M. Elizabeth Costello. Great Britain: Secker and Warburg; 2003.] book, presents us with a provocative question. By raising billions of animals a year, often in squalid conditions before brutally slaughtering them for their meat and/or skin, are we complicit to a crime of stupefying proportions?