Sharing Life with Dogs: Philosophical and Ethical Reflections on their Present and Future

https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n53.07

Felipe Sepúlveda Solar
Universidad de Chile

Abstract:

This article reviews the main philosophical and ethical constructs that have defined the way humans and non-human animals share world. It focuses on exploring what it means to share home and life with dogs and other animal companions, reflecting through different authors about the main challenges stemming from that circumstance: domestication, anthopomorfism, a dog as a property to someone else, the notion of pet, and the construction of interspecies relationships as vertical, assymetric, and subjugated. Further on, this article advances the idea that giving language and communication to the dog is an unavoidable humbleness exercise to allow them to participate in the construction of the world and to allow symmetric, bi-directional, and horizontal relationships. Finally, we argue that, in the long term, dogs and other animals will not live with us, but today they do as ambassadors of all the other species.

Keywords: ethics, animal ethics, companion animals, pets, dogs.