3 ms·

Dogs are little more than farm animals, in the sense that we're farming them for companionship. They might be our friends now that we have killed all the ones t

by proc0 3y ago

Dogs are little more than farm animals, in the sense that we're farming them for companionship. They might be our friends now that we have killed all the ones that would defy our commands. Look at any wild animal, do they want to be owned, do they want to be put on a leash? Of course not. Animals want to be free like any other living being, but just like cows, dogs would not survive on their own because we have artificially selected them. Imagine aliens capturing humans, breeding them in captivity until they are docile little creatures that cannot survive on their own. It's easy to feel sorry for farm animals because we eat them, but in a way people who love pets are not any better than the farmer, despite the culture thinking otherwise.

fiedzia 3y ago
> Look at any wild animal, do they want to be owned, do they want to be put on a leash? Numerous wild animals can be held as pets, without going through domestication, so apparently they do. If you feed them, they may have no reason to mind the leash, life is hard in the wild.
- proc0 3y ago
  I think we would need to make a distinction between holding a wild animal in captivity temporarily and owning one as a pet or as an exhibition at the zoo. When people help wild animals that is of course good for them, and it helps preserve wild life. Having them as pets on the other hand is a different matter, and I would be very skeptical even if the animal seems happy because ultimately it would not know or have awareness of what is really going on. That said, it's a complicated issue, so it's not like I'm saying no one should own pets.
Intralexical 3y ago
> Animals want to be free like any other living being, That's a nice thought, but in reality there are plenty of humans even that just get overwhelmed and scared at the thought of freedom, whether their own or other people's, and actively demand, seek, and create rigid and oppressive systems of rules and restrictions in order to trade freedom away for predictability. Otherwise… The entire human world would likely be shaped quite different from how it currently is. Our morals don't map cleanly onto physical reality, and values like "freedom" are unfortunately still relatively inconsequential next to causalities like "death", "killing", "starvation", and "culling". Does a tapeworm "want to be free" from its host? How about a male anglerfish, which only has a nervous system complex enough to find a larger female anglerfish which it can latch onto while its entire body is subsumed away? Animals want whatever animals are neurologically wired to want, humans included, and only sometimes does that align with our higher ideals of life having intrinsic worth. The nature of things simply is, and in a lot of cases, I think the ways we try to assign moral judgements to it are projecting our own social instincts onto ecological and cognitive systems that do not share our values. Certainly, the power dynamics, amount of control, and relative levels of awareness between humans and pets are… Would be rightfully horrifying, though, if the alternative were a relationship of equal peers.
- proc0 3y ago
  Ok, sure, maybe not all animals would feel that way, but I think probably all mammals or at least the smarter ones (relatively speaking). If dogs "want" to be pets, it's for the same reasons cows "want" to be farm animals, but it would be far-fetched to say a cow wants to be slaughtered and eaten. Sure a pet dog is not food, but compared to their wolf ancestors, they are far from their ideal natural state (if they have one at this point, which I guess is arguable, just like with cows). I guess I'm mostly pointing to a double standard between pets and farm animals. I eat meat, so I'm not advocating for any solution on either case here, just making an observation that potentially we are farming animals for more than food, and there aren't any movements advocating for the release of pets or alternatives to animal companionship.
grumpy-de-sre 3y ago
Thank you for saying that, it's a bitter pill for a lot of people to swallow. I suspect most folks who struggle with squaring the facts just haven't spent much time around livestock.
deleted 3y ago
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by proc0 3y ago

fiedzia 3y ago

> Look at any wild animal, do they want to be owned, do they want to be put on a leash? Numerous wild animals can be held as pets, without going through domestication, so apparently they do. If you feed them, they may have no reason to mind the leash, life is hard in the wild.

proc0 3y ago
I think we would need to make a distinction between holding a wild animal in captivity temporarily and owning one as a pet or as an exhibition at the zoo. When people help wild animals that is of course good for them, and it helps preserve wild life. Having them as pets on the other hand is a different matter, and I would be very skeptical even if the animal seems happy because ultimately it would not know or have awareness of what is really going on. That said, it's a complicated issue, so it's not like I'm saying no one should own pets.

Intralexical 3y ago

> Animals want to be free like any other living being, That's a nice thought, but in reality there are plenty of humans even that just get overwhelmed and scared at the thought of freedom, whether their own or other people's, and actively demand, seek, and create rigid and oppressive systems of rules and restrictions in order to trade freedom away for predictability. Otherwise… The entire human world would likely be shaped quite different from how it currently is. Our morals don't map cleanly onto physical reality, and values like "freedom" are unfortunately still relatively inconsequential next to causalities like "death", "killing", "starvation", and "culling". Does a tapeworm "want to be free" from its host? How about a male anglerfish, which only has a nervous system complex enough to find a larger female anglerfish which it can latch onto while its entire body is subsumed away? Animals want whatever animals are neurologically wired to want, humans included, and only sometimes does that align with our higher ideals of life having intrinsic worth. The nature of things simply is, and in a lot of cases, I think the ways we try to assign moral judgements to it are projecting our own social instincts onto ecological and cognitive systems that do not share our values. Certainly, the power dynamics, amount of control, and relative levels of awareness between humans and pets are… Would be rightfully horrifying, though, if the alternative were a relationship of equal peers.

proc0 3y ago
Ok, sure, maybe not all animals would feel that way, but I think probably all mammals or at least the smarter ones (relatively speaking). If dogs "want" to be pets, it's for the same reasons cows "want" to be farm animals, but it would be far-fetched to say a cow wants to be slaughtered and eaten. Sure a pet dog is not food, but compared to their wolf ancestors, they are far from their ideal natural state (if they have one at this point, which I guess is arguable, just like with cows). I guess I'm mostly pointing to a double standard between pets and farm animals. I eat meat, so I'm not advocating for any solution on either case here, just making an observation that potentially we are farming animals for more than food, and there aren't any movements advocating for the release of pets or alternatives to animal companionship.

grumpy-de-sre 3y ago

Thank you for saying that, it's a bitter pill for a lot of people to swallow. I suspect most folks who struggle with squaring the facts just haven't spent much time around livestock.

deleted 3y ago

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