CJC 2024 GP Prelim Paper 2 - Insert

1 Passage 1. Christine Rosen writes about Man’s relationship with pets. 1 In October 2018, a woman was forcibly removed from the plane before takeoff. The reason? Airline personnel noticed that the “emotional support animal” she had brought on board in a pet carrier was in fact a squirrel— a pet that was not allowed aboard under the airline’s policies but one she refused to relinquish. Defiantly she exclaimed, “You’re not taking my squirrel! You will not take my baby from me!” 5 2 As the ballad of the therapy squirrel suggests, something significant has changed in our relationship with our pets. Pets are now endowed with new rights and privileges and emotional lives pet owners claim for them. The impulse to treat our pets as beloved children and companions is not new. Romans buried their dogs in human cemeteries and talked about them like children. But the scale and scope of our pet obsessions have vastly increased since Roman times. 10 3 Until the mid-nineteenth century, the standards for what defined a pet were straightforward, and rarely sentimental. Today, the term companion animal is preferable to the label pet since the latter fails to respect an animal’s dignity. The title of guardian or carer is adopted rather than the more commonly used owner, which implies that the pet is a slave. This concern for animals’ dignity and rights has coincided with a sharp increase in the availability of commodities and services aimed at those same animals. There are now countless pet obedience training services, pet insurance companies, as well as pet toy companies. 15 4 On social media, pets and their owners pursue followers and ‘Likes’ with a fervor even the most determined reality-TV star would admire. Contemporary films also offer stories in which master and pet roles are reversed, with pets firmly guiding the lives of their flawed human companions. The recently released movie Alpha gives the origin story of the dog human relationship the full Hollywood treatment, showing a callow boy who grows into a man only with the aid of a wolf. Likewise, in the 2017 movie A Dog’s Purpose, the soul of a single dog is repeatedly reincarnated in a different time and place, always displaying an unerring instinct to do right and save the humans around him, often at the cost of his own life. 20 25 5 But our changing feelings about our pets are most starkly revealed by our consumer choices: how much and for what we are now willing to spend to make our pets happy and healthy. For wealthy pet owners who can afford it, there are services that will pick up dogs and take them for weekly three-hour hikes in the countryside, even as those lucky dogs’ owners toil away in cubicles to pay for it. When pet owners leave their pets behind for a few days, they can now lodge them at resorts complete with an à la carte menu, a bed with a memory-foam mattress and Ralph Lauren sheets. Pets can be ta