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Journal List > Can Vet J > v.47(8); Aug 2006

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Can Vet J. 2006 August; 47(8): 741–742.
PMCID: PMC1524831
Copyright and/or publishing rights held by the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association
Veterinary Medical Ethics
Bernard E. Rollin, PhD
Ethical question of the month — August 2006
You do work for a dairy client whose farm has recently been certified as organic. The client is now receiving a premium price for his milk. He calls you to treat a cow for acute mastitis and requests that you use a specific antibiotic drug and a specific anti-inflammatory drug both of which have very short milk withholding times. As you are treating the cow, you ask him what happens to the milk from this cow according to the rules of the organic certification program. He tells you that the regulations state that cows treated with conventional drugs, such as these, must have very long withdrawal times observed, but that the drugs you are administering will not be detected by any drug testing program. He would like you to leave him a bottle of each medication, so that he can treat subsequent cases himself. Although you are not a believer in the value of organic certification programs, you are surprised at this blatant disregard of the rules by a member of this organic cooperative. How should you respond?
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Responses to the case presented are welcome. Please limit your reply to approximately 50 words and mail along with your name and address to: Ethical Choices, c/o Dr. Tim Blackwell, Veterinary Science, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, Wellington Place, R.R.#1, Fergus, Ontario N1M 2W3; telephone: (519) 846-3413; fax: (519) 846-8101; e-mail: tim.blackwell/at/omaf.gov.on.ca
Suggested ethical questions of the month are also welcome! All ethical questions or scenarios in the ethics column are based on actual events, which are changed, including names, locations, species, etc., to protect the confidentiality of the parties involved.
Ethical question of the month — May 2006
Pets are occasionally presented to veterinarians for “convenience euthanasia.” The following are examples of reasons given for euthanasia: A new roommate is allergic to the pet, a new apartment does not allow pets. Veterinarians have been known to find new homes for these animals without notifying the original owners. Is convenience euthanasia a welfare issue, an ethical issue, or neither?
An ethicist’s commentary on characterizing of convenience euthanasia in ethical terms
There are various ways to approach this issue. The most obvious is by asking the question if death harms an animal. Clearly, inflicting pain causes harm and, thus, raises ethical questions. On the other hand, would killing an animal painlessly, albeit prematurely, constitute harm? On one view, which I and others have defended, it does not appear that animals possess the cognitive ability (lacking language) to grasp either the concept of life or the concept of death. It is hard to imagine, therefore, that in lacking this idea of life and its end, animals value life in itself. Therefore, I have argued that an animal cannot choose to trade off current pain and suffering (say from cancer treatment) for future life, as people do; thus, we must think seriously about causing them suffering, since for them there is, as it were, no light at the end of the tunnel.
On the other hand, other philosophers, such as Steve Sapontzis, have argued that one does cause harm to an animal even by killing it painlessly, since one is forestalling its future pleasures. This may indeed inform our commonsense moral intuition that even painless euthanasia is wrong when a healthy animal is killed for convenience, when we have every reason to believe that it could have enjoyed a happy life had it lived. Other philosophers respond that the notion of possible future pleasure is too obscure to be helpful.
In my view, one need not decide between these competing theories to firmly conclude that the killing of healthy animals is morally wrong, for whichever of the foregoing positions one chooses to believe, such action can be condemned on the basis of what the Greeks called issues of “virtue.” On this view, one judges actions by comparing them with the sorts of character traits one wishes to promote in a good society. Consider the following case: a very rich person decides to burn his Van Gogh paintings. They are his possessions; he has paid for them. One may condemn him for this by saying that he is thereby depriving others of the chance to see these paintings; that is partially true, but it is not the whole story, as he is not condemned as deeply if he keeps them locked away in his apartment and no one else can view them. The difference seems to be the primordial sense of horror at someone who would destroy something beautiful for fun. I think we would feel something similar towards a person who wantonly trampled a field of wildflowers even on his own property. Moreover, we certainly feel that way about a person who would kill or abandon an animal that has been a loyal companion and is possessed of special beauty. We are uncomfortable around such people — “What will they do next?”
If one adopts this sort of view, one can morally condemn acts of convenience euthanasia strongly on the grounds that they evidence the sorts of character we emphatically do not wish to cultivate or even tolerate in society, even if such an act does not, in an ultimate philosophical sense, “harm” the animal. If nothing else, we would reasonably fear that such a person would likely escalate to harming people, since he or she is of a makeup that we cannot empathize with.
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