Pets are closer to a slave than a child, they have no ability to ask or demand things of you and they get only what you choose to offer them. You can ignore every single need a pet has and just put them in a bag and carry them around like an inanimate object that can never protest your actions, and throw the bag in a river if you get tired of carrying it. You can have them killed or sell them or abandon them at your discretion. Children are only raised like this in the most unfortunate circumstances.
"You can ignore every single need a pet has and just put them in a bag"
No, you actually can't.
You can only do this if you switch off massive sections of the common brain modules for "reasonable functioning human". For those who think these are optional modules, please lock them in working RAM now. You might then understand why they are NOT optional.
I'm not advocating treating any living thing that way, but society is absolutely okay with it. You can do this with children too but as they grow they will demand you stop and they won't sit complacently while you lunch or work or commute.
You can, and animal rights and criminalizing abuse is slowly improving across the globe I think. But the cruelty that is illegal doesn't cover a lot of entrenched cruelty, like conflating their lives with our convenience and dropping your pet off at a shelter to be killed later, or taking your pet to a vet to be killed now, or do it yourself in many places, or leaving a baby animal alone all day, or chaining animals up permanently, or spending all day in a carry bag, etc etc.
