Are your beloved pets really "refugees?" According to a pair of New Jersey law professors, you're violating your animals' rights by even calling them "pets" in the first place.

Despite living with six rescue dogs, Rutgers University professors Gary Francione and Anna Charlton think of their companions more like "non-human refugees" that share their home. In a recent article on Aeon.co, the pair assert that domestication and pet ownership violate the fundamental rights of animals. "Non-human animals have a moral right not to be used exclusively as human resources, irrespective of whether the treatment is 'humane', and even if humans would enjoy desirable consequences if they treated non-humans exclusively as replaceable resources," Francione and Charlton wrote.

In other words, those "cage-free eggs" and "crate-free pork" that you eat are still forms of animal exploitation, the two allege. "However 'humanely' we treat animals, they are still subjected to treatment that, were humans involved, would be torture," Francione and Charlton argue.

In particular, the pair of professors claim that the humans' "most-numerically significant use" of animals – for food purposes – is unnecessary. "We don't need to eat animals for optimal health," the pair wrote. "Indeed, an increasing number of mainstream healthcare authorities, including the National Institutes of Health in the US, the American Heart Association, the British National Health Service, and the British Dietetic Association, have stated that a sensible vegan diet can be just as nutritious as a diet that includes animal foods."

And if it's not necessary to keep animals as food, it's also not ethical to keep them as "pets," Francione and Charlton wrote.

"We treat our six dogs as valued members of our family. The law will protect that decision because we may choose to value our property as we like. We could, however, choose instead to use them as guard dogs and have them live outside with virtually no affectionate contact from us. We could put them in a car right now and take them to a shelter where they will be killed if they are not adopted, or we could have them killed by a veterinarian. The law will protect those decisions as well. We are property owners. They are property. We own them."