Should we stop keeping pets? Why more and more ethicists say yes

Ninety per cent of Britons think of their pet as part of the family - 16% even included them on the last census. But recent research into animals' emotional lives has cast doubt on the ethics of petkeeping

It was a Tupperware tub of live baby rats that made Dr Jessica Pierce start to question the idea of pet ownership. She was at her local branch of PetSmart, a pet store chain in the US, buying crickets for her daughter's gecko. The baby rats, squeaking in their plastic container, were brought in by a man she believed was offering to sell them to the store as pets or as food for the resident snakes. She didn't ask. But Pierce, a bioethicist, was troubled.

"Rats have a sense of empathy and there has been a lot of research on what happens when you take babies away from a mother rat - not surprisingly, they experience profound distress," she says. "It was a slap in the face - how can we do this to animals?"