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> I thought the article really went out of its way to romanticize the captivity and torture of a non-domesticated wild animal. This is how I feel about dog own

> I thought the article really went out of its way to romanticize the captivity and torture of a non-domesticated wild animal. This is how I feel about dog ownership. We take children from their species, sterilize them, and gaslight them into thinking they're part of our family instead. The only reason dogs are domesticated is because we've been inbreeding their species for thousands of years and they literally can no longer live in nature because of how we've bred them. If anything, raising, hunting, and killing an animal is more natural than what we do.

emodendroket 9y ago
> The only reason dogs are domesticated is because we've been inbreeding their species for thousands of years and they literally can no longer live in nature because of how we've bred them. Dogs can't live in nature? I think that needs a citation. Or at least we need some kind of explanation for the apparently impossible phenomenon of stray and feral dogs.
- fhood 9y ago
  Nah, that at least is a fair point. Stray dogs mostly scavenge. They aren't actively hunting for the most part. My cat meanwhile used to catch at least 30% of her diet, something I know because she liked to disembowel small woodland creatures in the bathtub, where they couldn't escape.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I guess raccoons and vultures also can't live in the wild, then.
    - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
      "Dogs" is also a really big category. I think a German Shepard might be infinitely more suited for living the wild, than say a Chihuahua.
      - closure 9y ago
        My chihuahua was rescued on the streets of San Francisco after an unknown period of time fending for himself. He was a little underweight but not dramatically so. No signs of previous ownership (no chip, no collar, not neutered) so he was possibly just dumped somewhere at a young age (they estimated he was 1-1.5 yrs when found). He fiercely guards food and will snap at anyone that reaches for him. He hunts insects including flies and cockroaches (he caught at least a few of those on our walks). I don’t think he’d be as effective as a rat terrier, but I suspect he could hunt and kill field mice and maybe small rats.
        nradov 9y ago
        Chihuahuas are one of the most common breeds found in Bay Area animal shelters (along with pit bulls). Lots of unethical backyard breeders around here who dump surplus puppies.
      - tdb7893 9y ago
        German shepherds are interstingly often very inbred. From talking to my girlfriend (this is her field), it sounds like it's unlikely that any purebred dogs would be able to adapt well to an actual wilderness
  - alfredallan 9y ago
    I have a pack of dogs. And they all hunt opportunistically. There're plenty of (mostly eaten) prey corpses strewn over the acreage. Anecdotal I know but I'm sure you can read up on prey drive in numerous dog breeds.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  ...not to mention species of wild dogs on more than one continent!
- CocaKoala 9y ago
  They're probably referring to particular breeds that are known for chronic health issues. Dogs with extremely flat faces (think pugs)? They have a lot of trouble breathing. Also, their eye sockets are shallow and so their eyes will pop out of the socket sometimes. There's a litany of health issues related to chasing the breed standard for dogs, sometimes related to how the standard has been taken to an extreme that deform the dog and sometimes related to the massive inbreeding that's happened as a result of chasing the breed standard. There are certainly some dogs that can live in the wild, and there are certainly some breeders who try hard to be responsible about how they breed for the standard and how they breed their lines together, but the average purebred dog is not one you can just drop in the woods and it'll go find its own food and survive.
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  most dogs can't survive in proper nature alone, they often scavenge human trash and they don't mind human presence. if nature would be so nurturing and full of easily obtainable food, wolves which are far superior hunters and overall survivors would be plentiful. my subjective bet is that most domestic dogs could manage summer in many places, but wouldn't survive regular winter out there. even wolves struggle.
QAPereo 9y ago
That’s a truly bizarre, warped version of the history of humans and wolves, then dogs.
maxerickson 9y ago
At best you are using an esoteric definition of gaslighting there, I think you are probably misusing it. People mostly treat their dogs in a straightforward way.
- detritus 9y ago
  'Straightforward' for whom?
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Both the human and the dog.
    - detritus 9y ago
      Where the latter's concerned, I'm not sure that's knowable.
      - arcticfox 9y ago
        It seems unnecessarily complicated to suggest that dogs are interested in anything more than food/water, shelter, comfort, and basic relationships with something that can interact (whether it's a human, dog, or otherwise).
jonnathanson 9y ago
I'd highly recommend reading a book like "The Domestic Dog," which was recently updated with a new edition in 2017. It contains all of the latest science and anthropology around the origins of the human/dog relationship. The tl;dr is that dogs really do identify us as family, and in all likelihood, the first ancestral wolves to become domesticated dogs took as many co-evolutionary steps towards us as we did them. Humans and dogs have been evolving alongside each other for at least 15,000 years. The sorts of dog breeds that can't survive in the wild (bulldogs, etc.) are a fairly recent innovation in all of that time, dating back to the mid 1800s and the emergence of the modern breeding program. Dogs like being with us as much as we like having them around. They were the first domesticated species, and they are literally the only mammals we know of who can read human facial expressions and emotions as well as the great apes can. Our relationship with them is a partnership, not an enslavement. If you want to take issue with the way humans treat animals, there are so many better targets for outrage than our treatment of the dog. Take the cow or the chicken, for instance, most of whom lead a tortured and awful existence and would want nothing to do with us in a state of nature.
- hinkley 9y ago
  There was a genetic survey done a bit ago that suggests that wolves and dogs are more remotely related. That domestic dogs existed as a separate wild dog species from wolves at the time of domestication. Does that book talk about the phenomenon of baboons stealing puppies from wild dogs and raising them? Every time we look at it we end up pushing back the date of human canine cohabitation. If it turns out that this coevolution with dogs predates hominids, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.
  - jonnathanson 9y ago
    Yes, hence why I use the term "ancestral wolves" and not simply "wolves," in the hopes of avoiding confusion. Many people assume dogs are simply some sort of captured/degenerated/infantilized versions of the modern-day grey wolf. This is not at all the case. The likely ancestor of the domestic dog was an ancient lineage of Middle Eastern/Eurasian wolf that is presently extinct and did not survive the last glacial maximum -- because humans hunted its megafaunal prey to extinction. Dogs used to be classified by most textbooks as subspecies of Canis lupus, the grey wolf. Increasingly, genetic analysis shows that Canis familiaris might properly be its own species. The dog was, in all likelihood, domesticated multiple times over multiple thousands of years in various parts of the globe. The lineage that survived to present is likely to have come from the Fertile Crescent area, even though its domestication predates the agricultural revolution. (Dogs joined us when we were hunter-gatherers, and cats joined us when we settled down to store grain and thereby attracted rodents). I am not convinced that non-human apes "domesticated" the dog the same way we did, even if modern apes seem capable of taking actions superficially analogous to domestication. Ancestral wolves specifically followed human camps around and lived among us for (presumably) thousands of years before it even occurred to us to domesticate them as such. By that time, nature had 'pre-selected' them for us -- the friendly and cooperative ones, who could survive at the margins of our hunting parties, outcompeted their more feral cousins, who kept their distance from humans and then starved when the mammoths ran out. The first ancient wolves we came into frequent, nonviolent contact with were, in all likelihood, the result of many generations of natural selection before we set about artificially selecting them. Ironically, and counterntuitively, dogs were more naturally fit than wolves to survive in the early days of the Homo sapiens.
CocaKoala 9y ago
I recognize that not everybody does this, but as somebody who owns a pet (my wife and I both have cats), I take the responsibility of ownership very seriously. My cat doesn't have a lot of agency in her own life, so I try to get healthy food that she appears to enjoy, I play with her and try to provide the stimulation she wants, and I try to provide an environment that keeps her happy even if she isn't able to leave it. If she's not feeling well, I take her to the vet and get the care she needs as opposed to the care that is cheap. And at some point, she'll get sick and I'll have to make the choice about her quality of life being low enough that it's better for her to pass. There are ways to be responsible about pet ownership for animals like dogs and cats. It doesn't need to be this horrific experience you've painted it as.
- zachsnow 9y ago
  This is a sweet and considerate approach that many pet owners would do well to emulate. Thanks for sharing.
CryptoFascist 9y ago
> The only reason dogs are domesticated is because we've been inbreeding their species for thousands of years and they literally can no longer live in nature because of how we've bred them. This is false. The accepted mechanism is that wolves self-domesticated, and that humans and dogs co-evolved. You have also misused the word 'children'.
arcticfox 9y ago
Well that's a very strange interpretation. Other than the sterilization (which prevents extreme suffering of future dogs that wouldn't have homes), dogs for the most part seem to love every part of being part of human life. This bear stuff would be just fine too if they didn't torture it to death at the end.
navigator01 9y ago
Huh? You're misrepresenting reality, which is that dogs love us and we love our dogs. It's not complicated. Now puppy mills and the like are not good, but the very concept of dog ownership is wholesome.
dang 9y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15449966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15449966 and marked it off-topic.

emodendroket 9y ago

> The only reason dogs are domesticated is because we've been inbreeding their species for thousands of years and they literally can no longer live in nature because of how we've bred them. Dogs can't live in nature? I think that needs a citation. Or at least we need some kind of explanation for the apparently impossible phenomenon of stray and feral dogs.

fhood 9y ago
Nah, that at least is a fair point. Stray dogs mostly scavenge. They aren't actively hunting for the most part. My cat meanwhile used to catch at least 30% of her diet, something I know because she liked to disembowel small woodland creatures in the bathtub, where they couldn't escape.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I guess raccoons and vultures also can't live in the wild, then.
  - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    "Dogs" is also a really big category. I think a German Shepard might be infinitely more suited for living the wild, than say a Chihuahua.
    - closure 9y ago
      My chihuahua was rescued on the streets of San Francisco after an unknown period of time fending for himself. He was a little underweight but not dramatically so. No signs of previous ownership (no chip, no collar, not neutered) so he was possibly just dumped somewhere at a young age (they estimated he was 1-1.5 yrs when found). He fiercely guards food and will snap at anyone that reaches for him. He hunts insects including flies and cockroaches (he caught at least a few of those on our walks). I don’t think he’d be as effective as a rat terrier, but I suspect he could hunt and kill field mice and maybe small rats.
      - nradov 9y ago
        Chihuahuas are one of the most common breeds found in Bay Area animal shelters (along with pit bulls). Lots of unethical backyard breeders around here who dump surplus puppies.
    - tdb7893 9y ago
      German shepherds are interstingly often very inbred. From talking to my girlfriend (this is her field), it sounds like it's unlikely that any purebred dogs would be able to adapt well to an actual wilderness
- alfredallan 9y ago
  I have a pack of dogs. And they all hunt opportunistically. There're plenty of (mostly eaten) prey corpses strewn over the acreage. Anecdotal I know but I'm sure you can read up on prey drive in numerous dog breeds.
QAPereo 9y ago
...not to mention species of wild dogs on more than one continent!
CocaKoala 9y ago
They're probably referring to particular breeds that are known for chronic health issues. Dogs with extremely flat faces (think pugs)? They have a lot of trouble breathing. Also, their eye sockets are shallow and so their eyes will pop out of the socket sometimes. There's a litany of health issues related to chasing the breed standard for dogs, sometimes related to how the standard has been taken to an extreme that deform the dog and sometimes related to the massive inbreeding that's happened as a result of chasing the breed standard. There are certainly some dogs that can live in the wild, and there are certainly some breeders who try hard to be responsible about how they breed for the standard and how they breed their lines together, but the average purebred dog is not one you can just drop in the woods and it'll go find its own food and survive.
saiya-jin 9y ago
most dogs can't survive in proper nature alone, they often scavenge human trash and they don't mind human presence. if nature would be so nurturing and full of easily obtainable food, wolves which are far superior hunters and overall survivors would be plentiful. my subjective bet is that most domestic dogs could manage summer in many places, but wouldn't survive regular winter out there. even wolves struggle.

QAPereo 9y ago

That’s a truly bizarre, warped version of the history of humans and wolves, then dogs.

maxerickson 9y ago

At best you are using an esoteric definition of gaslighting there, I think you are probably misusing it. People mostly treat their dogs in a straightforward way.

detritus 9y ago
'Straightforward' for whom?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Both the human and the dog.
  - detritus 9y ago
    Where the latter's concerned, I'm not sure that's knowable.
    - arcticfox 9y ago
      It seems unnecessarily complicated to suggest that dogs are interested in anything more than food/water, shelter, comfort, and basic relationships with something that can interact (whether it's a human, dog, or otherwise).

jonnathanson 9y ago

I'd highly recommend reading a book like "The Domestic Dog," which was recently updated with a new edition in 2017. It contains all of the latest science and anthropology around the origins of the human/dog relationship. The tl;dr is that dogs really do identify us as family, and in all likelihood, the first ancestral wolves to become domesticated dogs took as many co-evolutionary steps towards us as we did them. Humans and dogs have been evolving alongside each other for at least 15,000 years. The sorts of dog breeds that can't survive in the wild (bulldogs, etc.) are a fairly recent innovation in all of that time, dating back to the mid 1800s and the emergence of the modern breeding program. Dogs like being with us as much as we like having them around. They were the first domesticated species, and they are literally the only mammals we know of who can read human facial expressions and emotions as well as the great apes can. Our relationship with them is a partnership, not an enslavement. If you want to take issue with the way humans treat animals, there are so many better targets for outrage than our treatment of the dog. Take the cow or the chicken, for instance, most of whom lead a tortured and awful existence and would want nothing to do with us in a state of nature.

hinkley 9y ago
There was a genetic survey done a bit ago that suggests that wolves and dogs are more remotely related. That domestic dogs existed as a separate wild dog species from wolves at the time of domestication. Does that book talk about the phenomenon of baboons stealing puppies from wild dogs and raising them? Every time we look at it we end up pushing back the date of human canine cohabitation. If it turns out that this coevolution with dogs predates hominids, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.
- jonnathanson 9y ago
  Yes, hence why I use the term "ancestral wolves" and not simply "wolves," in the hopes of avoiding confusion. Many people assume dogs are simply some sort of captured/degenerated/infantilized versions of the modern-day grey wolf. This is not at all the case. The likely ancestor of the domestic dog was an ancient lineage of Middle Eastern/Eurasian wolf that is presently extinct and did not survive the last glacial maximum -- because humans hunted its megafaunal prey to extinction. Dogs used to be classified by most textbooks as subspecies of Canis lupus, the grey wolf. Increasingly, genetic analysis shows that Canis familiaris might properly be its own species. The dog was, in all likelihood, domesticated multiple times over multiple thousands of years in various parts of the globe. The lineage that survived to present is likely to have come from the Fertile Crescent area, even though its domestication predates the agricultural revolution. (Dogs joined us when we were hunter-gatherers, and cats joined us when we settled down to store grain and thereby attracted rodents). I am not convinced that non-human apes "domesticated" the dog the same way we did, even if modern apes seem capable of taking actions superficially analogous to domestication. Ancestral wolves specifically followed human camps around and lived among us for (presumably) thousands of years before it even occurred to us to domesticate them as such. By that time, nature had 'pre-selected' them for us -- the friendly and cooperative ones, who could survive at the margins of our hunting parties, outcompeted their more feral cousins, who kept their distance from humans and then starved when the mammoths ran out. The first ancient wolves we came into frequent, nonviolent contact with were, in all likelihood, the result of many generations of natural selection before we set about artificially selecting them. Ironically, and counterntuitively, dogs were more naturally fit than wolves to survive in the early days of the Homo sapiens.

CocaKoala 9y ago

I recognize that not everybody does this, but as somebody who owns a pet (my wife and I both have cats), I take the responsibility of ownership very seriously. My cat doesn't have a lot of agency in her own life, so I try to get healthy food that she appears to enjoy, I play with her and try to provide the stimulation she wants, and I try to provide an environment that keeps her happy even if she isn't able to leave it. If she's not feeling well, I take her to the vet and get the care she needs as opposed to the care that is cheap. And at some point, she'll get sick and I'll have to make the choice about her quality of life being low enough that it's better for her to pass. There are ways to be responsible about pet ownership for animals like dogs and cats. It doesn't need to be this horrific experience you've painted it as.

zachsnow 9y ago
This is a sweet and considerate approach that many pet owners would do well to emulate. Thanks for sharing.

CryptoFascist 9y ago

> The only reason dogs are domesticated is because we've been inbreeding their species for thousands of years and they literally can no longer live in nature because of how we've bred them. This is false. The accepted mechanism is that wolves self-domesticated, and that humans and dogs co-evolved. You have also misused the word 'children'.

arcticfox 9y ago

Well that's a very strange interpretation. Other than the sterilization (which prevents extreme suffering of future dogs that wouldn't have homes), dogs for the most part seem to love every part of being part of human life. This bear stuff would be just fine too if they didn't torture it to death at the end.

navigator01 9y ago

Huh? You're misrepresenting reality, which is that dogs love us and we love our dogs. It's not complicated. Now puppy mills and the like are not good, but the very concept of dog ownership is wholesome.

dang 9y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15449966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15449966 and marked it off-topic.