Over 50 percent [of people in the United States] live with cats or dogs, and approximately 90 percent of those people regard their pets as members of their families and would risk injury or death to save the life of their pet. Americans spend approximately $7 billion annually on veterinary care for dogs and cats and over $20 billion on food and accessories for those and other pets.
These figures are used to imply that humans generally attribute moral status to pets, which is then contrasted with a lack of moral status attributed to the 8 billion nonhuman land animals who are slaughtered in the United States every year. This supposed double standard, which is referred to by ableist and stigmatizing phrase "moral schizophrenia," serves as the premise of the book. Thus, using the phrase "animal companions" as a stand-in for pets, Francione concludes:
We would finally have to confront our moral schizophrenia about animals, which leads us to love some animals, treat them as members of our family, and never once doubt their sentience, emotional capacity, self-awareness, or personhood, while at the same time we stick dinner forks into other animals who are indistinguishable in any relevant sense from our animal companions.
Without citing Francione, Michael Pollan makes the same assumption in The Omnivore's Dilemma, even repeating the same stigmatizing ableist language:
There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals today in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig — an animal easily as intelligent as a dog — that becomes the Christmas ham.
However, the reality is that the structure of our relationship to pets is substantially the same as the structure of our relationship to other nonhuman animals. While both Francione and Pollan focus on the affection human owners have for their pets, both fail to note that this affection coexists with, and is based on, domination and exploitation.
Both Francione and Pollan contrast pets with other animals that humans literally eat, but our relationship to pets is also one of consumption. When Francione cites that people in the United States spend $20 billion on food and accessories for pets and Pollan notes how people in the United States buy Christmas presents for their pet dogs, both are using consumerism to measure the supposed double standard, but this consumerism is not proof that a double standard exists. Quite the opposite, in fact. People spend money on their pets because of the psychological and material gains that come from owning other animals. Pets are not treated as if their lives have value independent of their human owners. Rather, pets are themselves treated as commodities that are then consumed.
