[DominikD]

This text starts with the wrong (and outdated) assumption that animals are owned. If your motivation is to OWN an animal, then sure, I'm totally against it. Especially if you shop for a dog or a cat that looks good in your surroundings.

Taking care of rescue dogs and cats, improving their living conditions and integrating them into family on the other hand is absolutely fine if done responsibly.

This means that you have to take animal's behavioral tendencies into account. Many rescue dogs experience separation anxiety so if you can't devote enough time to help them overcome that problem, adopt an animal with confirmed, friendly disposition. Shelters should let you know which animals are a good fit for your lifestyle (and in some cases the answer can be "none").

[wraptile]

> integrating them into family on the other hand is absolutely fine if done responsibly.

Is that not ownership?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

[Lochleg]

A rescue dog is still often becoming a family pet, and you have to consider if it makes all that much sense, especially on a massive scale. Rescuing dogs is only a stopgap measure. Everyone is still cursed with guilt for letting the system persist.

If a working dog reached retirement age, you would think they deserved to be sent to a farm or another place where they had some freedom after a life of captivity. Granted, truly wild dogs would be considered a problem, and the enormous pressure humans exert on nature has completely suppressed biodiversity, so there's not ever going to be a place for the canine species to be left alone.

We domesticated dogs a relatively long time ago and they became symbiotes, but we didn't really consider what that meant. They definitely seem to live in servitude as emotional mirrors and, as the article tries to highlight, fake children. Responsible dog "stewardship" is somewhat laughable because even their disposition has been selectively bred to the extreme to serve human interests. They've essentially lost some of the spark the wild animals are seen to possess. Some people think they are humbling themselves by cleaning up after a dog, but it's not done in service to the dog. No human is lowering themselves in any substantial way, and many people wouldn't even consider doing that for a dog. Actually, you seem to end up a hypocrite if you refuse to view even the most intelligent humans as callous and careless creatures no matter how hard anyone tries to give a dog a better life. Humans are cursed by sentience, and we realize we are in charge of making decisions, so we can never live a simple existence side-by-side with dogs and follow our nature.

It's always going to be ethically questionable to keep dogs. If we "need" service dogs or want them to have a purpose while preventing their extinction, it seems like most dogs should live in the wild on preserved land. A limited population of dogs of various breeds can be kept if they will be highly respected as working dogs and actually get to experience the (human) world assuming that even makes sense. We should track their evolution to see how much we are really changing them from their more natural state. Some people would consider all this a massive waste of resources (for a chosen, land mammal that, for one, is never going to be sentient unless they get an incredible opportunity millions of years after humans somehow go extinct). I tend to agree, but it's so hard to comprehend the monstrosity of a system we already have with household pets.

I may be thinking about all the wrong questions with my awkward mindset, but I doubt that you can really know that you've made a significant leap by correcting bad assumptions about our relationship with subservient animals. From an observer's view, humans are bound to prove themselves pathetically predictable in some ways and indecipherably crazy in others when it comes to how we end up "looking after" other entities. For example, someone is probably desperate or foolish enough to wish they could talk to their animal. That's an incredibly scary proposition. If someone purported to have an AI that could tell us what a dog was thinking, it would better if it was just a trick that we could use to deceive ourselves.