Every child should have a dog. It gives them valuable life lessons about responsibility, fidelity, unconditional love and to always turn around three times before you lie down.
I grew up around dog show people and breeders and can confidently say that I learned a lot more about negative qualities in people than positive ones in dogs. Moreover some types of dogs are just by disposition, awful.
Alternative viewpoint: separating a dog from its natural social life and forcing its integration into a human world, even if done out of a concept of affection, is morally wrong. I suspect future generations will liken the domination of many species, such as dogs and cats, to slavery.
You’re thinking of the wolf pack that dogs came from millennia ago to be its “natural social life”. But the dogs around today are the result of myriad generations bred to be social with humans.
Dogs have orbital muscles above their eyes that wolves lack. The sole purpose of these muscles is to enable the dog to emote better... to humans. Dogs also cooperate with and interpret physical cues from humans the way wolves might with their packmates only. This also means that dogs can interpret uniquely human physical cues, such as pointing with a finger, which wolves cannot.
The natural social life of the dog is the human world. Humans and dogs co-evolved to live and work together. No other species enjoys this kind of symbiosis with us to this level; the horse probably comes the closest.
Hmm. Not one single bit of information about "natural dog/cat life" is encoded into a shelter kitten's brain. All the data used to train their brain came from humans and their human environment. Cats even learn to talk human (as best as their vocal apparatus and GPU allows). Whether they're better off or worse off I don't know, but any given cat only knows it's historical environment. They're not "taken" from some other place. That happened tens of thousands of years ago and no brain content from that time has been propagated to present day cats.
Fwiw my cats have friends that are deer, by virtue of there being deer in their environment, and their curiosity. And deer are quite curious too. Actually we have magpies that are friends with deer too. If cats were somehow pre-wired to only want to associate with cats, why are they associating with deer?
Dogs evolved over the last 45k years to be integrated with humans at a higher level than any other species. They need us, in the sense that they've offloaded the cognition needed for optimal living to the human species.
They gave up pack hunting, optimized cooperative socialization, amplified gentle and nurturing behaviors. Not only should all dogs be included in human lives, we have a moral responsibility to the species to provide for them the best possible existence.
This is not in support of fur-babies or dogs in strollers, to be clear. Dogs need function, stimulation, purpose, and relationships.
Cognitive studies, and the ongoing research with buttons, now in the tens of thousands of dogs and other pets, demonstrate that they're capable of understanding and using language, complex abstract thought, nuanced emotion, dreaming, strategizing, planning, and more. They'll never get to the point of writing books, but they can tell lies and play jokes, be sad, scared, brave, loving, goofy, and kind.
The idea that dogs should be wild is morally abhorrent - they are inextricably interwoven with the story of humanity, and dependent on us for their best lives. It's got nothing to do with affection, and everything to do with many tens of thousands of years of accelerated evolution resulting in specific complementary adaptations to humanity.
Not at all like slavery and I very much doubt that anyone will ever think so.
Slaves can state they want to be free, and often rebelled and resisted. Spartacus, the Zanj rebellion, the Haitian Revolution, and many more.
It requires constant indoctrination and denial of access to ideas and brutal suppression to even try to keep the resistance down even to those levels. No one censors what dogs can read (unlike, say, The Slaves Bible).
Dogs are demonstrably significantly intellectually inferior to human beings. other humans beings are not.
I do think it is lucky for them that other human species have not survived as they are demonstrably biologically different (at least not counting those we can interbreed with), probably unable to resist anything like as effectively, and would be far better slaves than humans and better experimental subjects than animals.
ch4s3|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
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Cosi1125|3 months ago
It's not a laughing matter. How else will you repel bugs from your bed?
block_dagger|3 months ago
HeinzStuckeIt|3 months ago
You’re thinking of the wolf pack that dogs came from millennia ago to be its “natural social life”. But the dogs around today are the result of myriad generations bred to be social with humans.
bitwize|3 months ago
The natural social life of the dog is the human world. Humans and dogs co-evolved to live and work together. No other species enjoys this kind of symbiosis with us to this level; the horse probably comes the closest.
dboreham|3 months ago
Fwiw my cats have friends that are deer, by virtue of there being deer in their environment, and their curiosity. And deer are quite curious too. Actually we have magpies that are friends with deer too. If cats were somehow pre-wired to only want to associate with cats, why are they associating with deer?
Swizec|3 months ago
Cats famously domesticated themselves though. More of a symbiosis than subjugation
observationist|3 months ago
They gave up pack hunting, optimized cooperative socialization, amplified gentle and nurturing behaviors. Not only should all dogs be included in human lives, we have a moral responsibility to the species to provide for them the best possible existence.
This is not in support of fur-babies or dogs in strollers, to be clear. Dogs need function, stimulation, purpose, and relationships.
Cognitive studies, and the ongoing research with buttons, now in the tens of thousands of dogs and other pets, demonstrate that they're capable of understanding and using language, complex abstract thought, nuanced emotion, dreaming, strategizing, planning, and more. They'll never get to the point of writing books, but they can tell lies and play jokes, be sad, scared, brave, loving, goofy, and kind.
The idea that dogs should be wild is morally abhorrent - they are inextricably interwoven with the story of humanity, and dependent on us for their best lives. It's got nothing to do with affection, and everything to do with many tens of thousands of years of accelerated evolution resulting in specific complementary adaptations to humanity.
graemep|3 months ago
Slaves can state they want to be free, and often rebelled and resisted. Spartacus, the Zanj rebellion, the Haitian Revolution, and many more.
It requires constant indoctrination and denial of access to ideas and brutal suppression to even try to keep the resistance down even to those levels. No one censors what dogs can read (unlike, say, The Slaves Bible).
Dogs are demonstrably significantly intellectually inferior to human beings. other humans beings are not.
I do think it is lucky for them that other human species have not survived as they are demonstrably biologically different (at least not counting those we can interbreed with), probably unable to resist anything like as effectively, and would be far better slaves than humans and better experimental subjects than animals.
phito|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
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