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This Christmas, my family spent a lot of time and money trying to make our dog, Necco, not die. Suffice to say, it was not a good time.

Necco is four years old, which made his sickness easier for his body to fight and harder on us. He is also epileptic, so any major imbalance in his body results in seizures. And he swallowed something bad--a piece of cellophane--as dogs are apt to do. There was a day of vomiting, and then one of seizures, a day where he would not eat, then a day where he would not drink, and then a couple days where he would do neither. Our vet could find no explanation, so we took him to animal emergency room, where he had an endoscopy, an x-ray, ultimately surgery. It was a long and arduous process And yet we went through with it, we paid for it, we kept going when we were really unsure if all of this would be for naught.

Should we have been this deeply concerned for an animal? After a particularly rough morning at the ER, my mom came home and asked me, “Is this ethical?” I've taken classes in ethics but spending gobs of money on animals, when it could be spent on people, had never come up. Where was the line?

In the simplest sense, dogs are a canid that have evolved to live symbiotically with humans, providing some service in exchange for food. When the dog became more of a companion than a worker, physical health—and youth—became less vital to his function. And when a dog is a companion he is very often anthropomorphized, and valued as a human being. But a pet will be euthanized or shipped off to the humane society--no such fate threatens our human siblings (you can debate this on your own word count). For all the affection we have for our animals, we still see ourselves in dominion over them.

Biblically, this is sound. God gave us dominion over the earth and everything in it--and the first thing this requires is sound judgement. Allocating limited resources often means prioritizing. But the lines are hard to draw. Is it right, for example, to spend more money keeping my dog fat and happy than helping feed starving human populations worldwide? Is it better to induce a dog's death than to sink significant amounts of money into restoring him to health? The global society we live in has created the sort of anomie where, overwhelmed with the struggles faced worldwide, it's easier to throw our crumbs to the dogs in our house than the beggars outside.

All of this assumes we were only given dominion over animals. That is not entirely true: we are also stewards. Like other domestic animals, I would argue that the dog has a right and God-given place in our lives. Thus, we should treat him with the care we treat the other things we steward here on earth: our land, our bodies, our resources. And while stewardship still means managing and making those hard value judgements to cull populations or allocate resources, these decisions also require a genuine concern. When we see our stewardship of a pet bleeding into what I can only term love, perhaps we should not reject that, but instead use it as a model of Christian care for the earth—and other humans, known and unknown."You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed." - "The Little Prince," Antoine de Saint Exupery