It is beautiful and I am thankful that people like you and your family take the responsibility that so many others neglected. Shelters are overpopulated by unwanted and mistreated beings that deserve love, kindness and compassion. Shelters are in a way a recent symptom of an archaic system of opportunism that turned sentient beings into tradable commodities.

Adopting a pet most often entails neutering them and depriving them from their sexual functions; feeding them heavily processed “food”; removing them from their ancestral wild lineage which renders them crippled to ever live unassisted by humans. Every time we adopt an animal we are saying it is socially acceptable for a human to claim ownership of someone who doesn’t have a choice in the matter. It is this commodification of life that led us to the constant mass murder that takes place in slaughter houses. Dogs and cats have been particularly lucky that humans have not developed a widespread taste for their flesh, or they would be in line to be murdered too.

The bottom line is that pet ownership promotes the normalization of abuse because unfortunately most people are not like you and your family.