Pesach and pets

[cellio]

During Pesach we are not permitted to eat, own, or benefit from chametz (leaven, but it's more complicated than that now). Traditional interpretations of halacha raise this as a problem for pet owners, because keeping your pets alive benefits you. So you have to find compliant forms of pet food, or send the pets elsewhere for a week, or perhaps sell the pets along with your chametz (I'm not sure if that works -- that would make you the custodian of someone else's pets for the week).

I think this interpretation of "benefit from" makes sense in the case of livestock (that you're ultimately going to profit from in some way), but I don't see it for pets. Pets aren't profit centers; they're family members -- you can argue about pecking order within the family, but that's another matter.

Still, I am mindful of the traditional problem. I can't change the food (one is on a special diet), and I'm not going to send them away or sell them, but I can still do something, without even invoking compassion or arguing about whether pikuach nefesh (serious health issues) applies to non-humans.

So, I hereby transfer ownership of the cat food in the house to the cats.

Comments

[cellio]

Are non-humans ever bound by the halacha at all?

Nope. It's not about what they can eat; it's about what I can own. So since I'm not going to dip into the kibble anyway, it's not like I actually need to own their food. Ok, I can't use their food to feed strays, but I wasn't going to do that anyway.

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

Ah, that makes sense. Personally I don't think of myself as a cat /owner/, more of a cat host or cat maintainer :p

Is Parrot Food Kosher?

[rob-of-unspace.livejournal.com]

I was going to joke about how easy it would be for parrots at Passover. Strangely, though, a joke about parrots and crackers/matzoh sounds vaguely racist. That's just a human reaction: a parrot would simply say "I don't care about stereotypes: give me the &*^% cracker or I'll bite you."

("Are parrots religious?" is a disturbing question for another time. Short answer: No.)

Depending upon the diet the parrot is given, there may be grain products, where the question is "Is it chametz free?" Interesting question, and on looking into it, I've got a headache.

The problems of transfering ownership of items to a creature that can understand ownership, token economies, cause and effect and can talk about it is an exercise left to the reader.