I believe if you take on a responsibility, you have a debt. When young I worked on a farm. Animals were used and were butchered - but done so in an ethical manner. I'm no crazy PETA person. Still, neglect is wrong and science has found links to how people treat animals corresponds with how they treat other humans.

@Beowulfsfriend I guess it depends on whether or not you believe being removed a person or two from the direct suffering makes it not count as you being the cause. Anyone who eats commercially produced meat causes tremendous torture and suffering of animals. I'm pretty sure those studies don't account for this, either. Maybe if one justifies the abandonment of the animal (and the potential future destruction of them) the same way people do for their food items it also wouldn't be included in those studies... Anyway, from my perspective, there are very few people who aren't pots to the kettles abandoning their pets.

@JeffMurray it is definitely a mixed bag. And, we, humans, consider ourselves the superior species on the planet. We certainly can kill anything and anyone that we want to. We can even destroy the majority of life that is currently here. We won't be here forever. In one of Kurt Vonnegut's lesser novels, he has mankind evolve, over a million years into a dolphin like creature.