A New Jersey lawmaker wants to give you a tax break for your family’s dog or cat. Under a bill introduced in May, if you save your receipts for food, litter, a leash, the vet and all the rest, the state would hand you a credit for as much as $900 a year.
The bill would compel the director of the New Jersey Division of Taxation to spend money on animal care without ever calling that animal a “person,” a “child” or even a “dependent.” It invents a category, “household pet,” and helps pay the bills for that animal’s upkeep.
The proposal will probably die in committee. It is noteworthy, though, because that invented “pet” category provides a funhouse mirror image of a fight raging in Washington, D.C., over what the word “person” means. Put the New Jersey bill and the Washington debate together, and something uncomfortable comes into view: Personhood — with all its fundamental rights and protections — gets determined based on politics rather than on science, sentience or any honest account of beings that can think or feel.
In the spring, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services began describing frozen embryos as “children who already exist and are in need of a family.” No federal tax credit came with that label, although critics are wondering whether one might follow. There is no tax help for the families paying for IVF. What we have is one noun dropped into a relatively obscure administrative policy guidance: “children,” the most powerful word in law, assigned to cells in a freezer.
Happy the elephant
Now, consider Happy, a 55-year-old elephant at the Bronx Zoo. She was the first of her kind to recognize herself in a mirror. Lawyers in 2018 asked New York’s highest court for one ruling on her behalf: to treat her as a “person” who, having committed no crime or other offense against the state, had a right not to be imprisoned. In 2022, the court said no. Happy, in failing health and long without elephant companions, was euthanized in captivity last May.
Put the three examples side by side.
A frozen embryo, with no brain and no capacity to feel, is deemed a person.
An elephant — a social being capable of sophisticated communication and interaction, and who knows her own reflection — is not a person.
And the dog on your couch gets a tax break on the quiet condition that nobody call her a person at all.
The law is not confused. These choices are deliberate. Whether they make sense is another matter entirely. “Person” travels toward the causes politicians favor and away from the ones they don’t.
You should care about this, even if you have no pets and have never seen an embryo.
A $900 credit is a small matter; personhood is not. It runs through inheritance, wrongful-death suits, criminal law and the tax code. Change the meaning in one place and it moves everywhere. When the Alabama Supreme Court called frozen embryos “extrauterine children”in 2024, fertility clinics stopped work within days, and the state legislature raced to reverse the ruling within weeks.
The word spreads
The pet credit is no model of good policy. We are skeptical of it. A subsidy for pet food flows mostly to households that can afford pets, while the federal child tax credit shortchanges the poorest children because their parents earn too little to qualify. Domestic animals living in homes where people are taking credits on their tax returns are in far less peril than animals in labs or factory farms.
What a government funds through the tax code is always a judgment about where care is most needed and most wanting. We would not put domestic cats and dogs at the front of that line.
New Jersey is at least fighting fairly. Its bill makes a plain offer and lets lawmakers weigh it: Here is the money and here is who receives it. Decide whether it is worth the cost.
The federal personhood strategy skips that debate. It declares who is a “child” and lets the consequences spread through every law the word touches. Courts and lawmakers should not play that game. Recognize the care that people give, and pay for it honestly if you choose. But stop using personhood to fuel an ideological crusade that defies science and common sense.
You do not have to call a cat a person to help someone feed it. New Jersey just proved as much. The real danger runs the other way: calling something a person to win an argument, and then living with the consequences.
