The Tattooing of Animals

While looking online for an article about animals testing, I found some articles about the tattooing of animals that caught my interest. This topic is becoming a major debate between tattoo artists and animal activists recently. The tattooing of animals has been done for years now, but only for the purpose of identification. The identification tattoos are given while the animals are under anesthesia and are small and limited to numbers and letters. Now, the issue is about tattooing pets as an art form. In this particular article, a tattoo artist is criticized for tattooing his two pit bulls on their stomach. Animal activists claim this is a form of animal abuse because the dogs cannot give consent to receiving a tattoo. Tattoos are known to be painful and the activists claim the tattoos cause the animals pain even if the animal is asleep during the process because the healing process takes much longer and lasts after the animal has woken up. The pet has no way of communicating that they want the tattoo or not so by giving them a tattoo without permission is taking advantage of them. The tattoo artist defends tattooing his dogs by claiming they were asleep when he gave them the tattoos and they cannot tell the tattoos are even there. He also stated that he is an artist and this is just a form of his artwork that he is transferring to his pets. Descartes would agree with the tattoo artist and disagree with the animal activists. Descartes believes that animals do not have thoughts so he would argue that the animals would not care or not if they had tattoos. Descartes also thinks that testing on animals is acceptable and tattooing might be considered a form of testing.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/01/us/dog-tattoos/index.html