Animal Slavery

The Pet Emancipation Squad raids my house at 4.30 on a Monday morning.

I'm scrubbed, dressed and standing at the door to welcome them like a bell hop.

I was tipped off at 4.15am. Thanks to the courage of my neighbour with the fox.

“It's a wild animal. I don't feed it".

She lives by the village green. Across from the carpark where the PES gathers to brief. What's to discuss? They just screw an earbud into their brains and parrot whatever nonsense comes spewing out of it. Surely they're meat puppets for chatbots?

“Are you [my name] of [this address]?”

I am he.

“We have reason to suspect that you are holding a canine being in domestic bondage.”

🙄

“The Animal Slavery Act of 2036 specifically prohibits the bondage of sentient creatures, including canines, as domestic pets.”

My watch pings.

“The push notification you have received is a digital court order. It empowers us, as authorised agents of the Pet Emancipation Squad to undertake a thorough search of this property to locate and emancipate said animal. This search may be livestreamed for the purposes of training and edutainment.”

I know who narked on me. It's my other neighbour. The one who keeps rats.

"They're a pest! The exterminator has been three times. Who wants to live with rats?"

She does. She loves rats. She wants to live with them and feed them from the palm of her hand and stroke their coarse rat backs and let them curl their pink rat tails round her fingers while she whispers in their little rat ears and kisses their little rat lips. She loves them so much she's turned into a rat. She keeps the PES off her back by acting as an enthusiastic informant. I wonder what she could have possibly seen? The look in my eyes, I guess. Like I’ve seen the look in hers. Game knows game.

The three of them push past me into the house, wearing gloves, masks and Tyvek©️ coveralls.

It looks like one of those crime dramas we all used to watch when we thought the worst thing you could do to another person was kill them.

Before all this nonsense.

They go about their business, shining lights and waving swabs across surfaces. They insert the swabbed strips into mobile devices that instantly detect traces of pet hair and animal body fluids. If there are any. There aren’t.

They're not serious.

I know they're not serious because they haven't brought a dedicated camera crew. They're just livestreaming it via body cam to incentivise free subscribers to go paid and gain access to the good stuff. The raids where the PES actually finds pets.

Helicopters circle an old woman standing on her third storey balcony cradling a cat and threatening to jump unless the PES leaves her alone.

Spoiler: she jumps.

(cat was fine)

What a joke. These are noobs. They're doing this for the literal purpose of training. Of course, they's always a chance they get lucky with these training raids and find a dog in the wall. Or I start shooting or whatever. That would be a dream scenario. Viewers would see me taken down, killed or auto-jailed live. Then the footage would be edited and graded and made available on demand on Netflix or Twitch or whatever makes the most money these days.

What a world. Crime doesn't pay; but Justice does.

Justice has a lucrative streaming deal.

But Justice is under pressure to produce a constant stream of fresh content. It's obvious that they're struggling. They're living off the back catalogue. Highlights reels that date back to the good old days. The two years or so post-legislation. No one's stupid enough to keep textbook pets at home anymore. Not 5 years in. Everyone's chosen the path of least persistence. Everyone who's not in jail. Everyone who survived those first bloody years.

All I have to do is keep my cool. There's no dog in here.

But the PES is insane. Seemingly by design. The only thing that can rival the entertainment value of watching a pet owner get snuffed by the PES is when a PES agent mistakes some stuffed animal or jelly snake for a live pet and they all go berserk and snuff the non-pet owner. Apologies are made and compensation paid - but it never amounts to more than a fraction of what they'll make on the streaming rights. So it's sweet bang for buck.

It's as if the front-end is inhumane by design.

5 years into this nonsense and the backend is getting desperate. The streaming deals are all tied to views and paid subs. Those metrics rely on a regular stream of fresh content to satisfy the millions of thirsty eyeballs that have already drunk the back catalogue dry. The last I ep I saw trending was some poor couple who got auto-jailed for keeping a ‘pet wasp's nest’ in their loft. They're appealing, of course, which is entertainment in itself, and they might go free, but who knows? The process has been dragging on for 6 months. The process is the punishment. The punishment is the entertainment.

If only people didn't like keeping pets.

For me it feels almost… natural. Whatever that means. But I'm 60 now. I grew up in a house full of pets. Dogs, cats, birds, a duck. All of them. Unconscionable now. For people like me, pet ownership is an innate vice. An urge that needs to be suppressed. It's a complete non-issue for the next generation. They grew up pet-free well before anyone went and made a law about it. Legislation was the natural culmination of decades worth of incremental activism.

That's how I'm going to beat this rap.

The agents are all post-pet. What's the old adage?

To catch a criminal you have to think like a criminal.

These agents simply have no feeling for the mind of a crook like me. They grew up secure in the knowledge that pet-keeping is slave-owning is a no-no. They simply don't understand people my age. I remember scowling at my parents for smoking. They'd quit. by then, of course. But they came from a generation that smoked like mine drank coffee. Their history was an eternal present to me. They were people who had smoked. A lower form of human being. I treated my parents as the embodiment of that collective vice. What can I say? I was a dick. I'm still a dick. These PES agents are dicks too.

But they're a different flavour of dick.

It's only the oldies like me who blow up long and fruitful marriages, and their relationships with their adult children because they can't seem to kick their pet-keeping ways.

The antsiness is palpable in my generation now the loopholes have all been closed.

Dogs and cats and caged rodents and birds and so on were all obvious surrenders. The whole 'support animal’ loophole only lasted for the five minutes it took for the science to kick in. Feeding wild animals is now an act of animal bondage punishable even more severely than failure to surrender an animal born into domestication.

Some people take enormous risks on tier 3 pets.

All the loophole reptiles are surrendered as soon as the Supreme Court rules that bug catching doesn't meet the definition of key work: things that can't be done better by machines. Then comes silliness like the glass indoor worm farms for composting. Still legit, because those animals are working in an accelerated carbon sequestration occupation. But after the giddy thrill of the court order, the nation's urban worm farmers wake up to a pyrrhic victory: the pleasure of of paying full whack on an annual working animal license to watch a seething mass of worms crawl through their food scraps. 🤮

So here we are. Living in a world without cats.

What everybody wants is a working dog. But to have one now, you had to be in possession of one at the time the law kicked in.

That's how I come to pay sixteen million dollars for this semi-rural three acre working farm. My flock of 12 sheep are key working animals. Their wool replaces a plastic product for home insulation.

And everyone knows that working sheep need to be mustered.

By my working dog.

It's 5am and I'm bored of them touching all my stuff.

I ask them if they want to see Collie. They really do. Cameras off (the location and identity of working animals is virtually the only thing protected by privacy laws these days). We go out the back, I put on gumboots, and lead them down the path behind the hot tub to the kennel at the bottom of the hill.

It's protected by a twin-layer cage. There are a lot of locks. I can feel them getting twitchy as I 2FA through external and internal gates into the compound. The kennel looks like a dog house on Mars. Touch ID slides open the pressurised air lock with a whoosh like the ones in Star Wars films. I speak the voice activated password to pop the internal hatch.

There's a gasp from one of the Squad.

The newest noob. The first indication that I'm interfacing with real human beings. Not just meat puppets. I bet she's never seen a dog IRL. Collie lies on her side, tongue spilling out of her mouth, as she pants, asleep. She's an old girl now. A septuagenarian in dog years. Even so. I know that noob's gasp. It takes me a lot of practice to suppress that reaction. The feeling still surges through my body every time I see my Collie.

She looks at me and gingerly gets to her feet. She doesn't have the sense to suppress her emotions. She doesn't know how to lie. She just wants to be near me. I excuse her seeming familiarity.

“It's because she knows me as a source of food."

I tell her to settle down. I use the same tone of voice I use for Siri. She doesn't recognise that tone because it's unfamiliar to her. My public voice. I give the low whistle and she puts her belly to the ground. This time the Squad gasper just about manages to suppress her reaction. I tell them what I know.

“She's trained to do that. Well, it's bred into her, but she needs a specific human voice to switch the instinct on. A master. It's likely because we co-evolved to work together.”

I don't tell them what else I know: why so many dog owners chose to die in battle, or murder-suicide, rather than surrender their non-working best friend.

The chief PES woman performs a visual inspection of the kennel.

"Sir, this a working animal, it shouldn't be housed in a temperature-controlled environment.”

Artificial life extension is working animal torture. I've tell her I've got a license for the dog and a license for the kennel. I tell her I'm obliged to provide a hermetically sealed, ground-anchored abode. One that can't be penetrated by any form of scanning device. For purposes of security, unfortunately. Otherwise some sick f-ck will steal my working dog and reduce it to domestic slavery. Kidnap it somewhere off grid, where there are no neighbours to rat them out to the PES.

As if a place like that could exist in this world.

That hermetic seal means Collie needs all sorts of equipment to support the normal functions of life. Without the air circulation system she'll suffocate, and without temperature control she'll bake or freeze. Either way I'll be auto-jailed for animal murder. Stiffer sentence than killing a person.

I've won and they know it.

I ask them if they want to inspect my flock of sheep to make sure they're in working animal order too. They don't care to do that. I get it. I like sheep a lot, but they're obviously not pets. They're clearly bred to be docile animals that perform their work at a respectful emotional distance from humans, and not do anything unpredictable or dangerous on the occasions that we have to come into contact. They're basically biological AI for growing meat and wool. Even as lambs you just con't get the complicity vibes off them that you get automatically with dogs or cats. And some birds. Put it this way: in the midst of all this nonsense, no one has been snuffed or auto-jailed for keeping a domestic sheep.

I walk the PES back up the hill and see them out.

The chief is apologetic. They're just doing their job. She can't tell me what happens to emancipated animals. For one, she's never encountered a live pet. And if she ever does, they call in another branch of the squad to deal with it. I wonder out loud about what happened to the pet wasps nest. She looks at me as if I'm talking nonsense.

I doubt the early advocates for this nonsense are pleased with the results.

They just wanted to win an argument. It's remarkable to think that all this reality manifested from some own-the-libs social media barbarians who wanted to put one over the vegan meat-is-murder activists by flipping the script. It's not working animals that are the problem. The problem is unemployed animals. The ones unable to express their true nature. Cooped up and mollycoddled by urbanised know-nothings. They argued that keeping ex-greyhounds in small city apartments is an act of torture rather than rescue. In between all the dog breeding scandals and bullsh*t 'rescue animal’ crap (rescued from pedigree breeders and resold at a markup…) It quickly becomes as morally untenable to keep domestic pets as it had been to keep human slaves.

"But I'm a good owner.”

There are no good owners. There are no good mobs. The problem with arguing something for less than genuine reasons is that sometimes that idea takes on a life of it's own. I remember the same thing happening with some right wing menanist white pride (or something like that) movement back in the day. Started as a joke.

Then nonsense becomes tolerated while common senses are not.

Now a remnant of rich buggers like me muster small flocks of sheep once a week.

Others walk a team of clydesdales yoked to a plough, helping to sew an extraneous field of wildflowers for butterflies and bees.

Working pet ownership as a pastime for millionaires. Millionaires with foresight.

The PES leaves.

Across the road my neighbour’s curtain twitches.

She'll wait for the sound of their van to recede, then she'll go to her pantry, grab a fistful of sunflower seeds, open an access panel into her ceiling, and start kissing her rats.

Good for her.

I use the same van noise to time my trek back down the path behind the hot tub to the kennel at the bottom of the hill. I go through the biometric motions and hop into the airlock. I close it behind me and breathe fat gulps of air. I'm calm. I take off all my clothes and pop the hatch. Collie is waiting for me. Panting. With a big dog smile on her face. I stretch out on her hairy blanket. She curls up beside me. Her snout nestles into my armpit. I lay my arm on her haunch. It's the only way either of us can sleep.

Within seconds we're dreaming of a better world.

I'll scrub all the evidence off myself in the hot tub later this morning.

On my way way back up the hill.