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Imagine aliens captured humans and did the same to us.
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.
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 artif…
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.
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 artif…
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting, though, because anyone who has ever owned a cat knows that they are only barely domesticated. It might be something in the canine brain that makes it easy to domesticate them.
It's because dogs are wolf with the Williams Syndrome. A DNA deletion syndrome which reduces aggression and increases empathy. In humans the syndrome produces individuals with characteristic facial features, a big smile and friendly traits. Edit: visibly dog lovers are not too keen on learning that their best friends have a genetic abnormality. But that doesn't make it less true, it's pretty well documented. It doesn…
It's more likely that the social phenotype that is present with many WS patients emerged in dogs due to evolutionary pressures (explicit and implicit breeding) than dogs emerging due to WS.
Reminded me of the experiment to domesticate silver foxes[1]. Apparently they got quite tame foxes in just 30 generations. Interestingly, while they were selected purely for lack of aggression towards humans they started to develop dog-like physical traits. Hasn't been replicated yet, and doubtfully will, but interesting. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
A few years ago someone was raising new questions about the validity of this study, it doesn't seem mentioned in the wikipedia page and I don't know how/if it was resolved or settled: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/russian-foxes-tameness-d...
Hence why I added the bit about not being replicated, it's far from settled science. Intriguing though, IMHO.
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I've made this argument many times and it always raises eyebrows and induces shrugs. We as a species co-evolved with some animals and not others. Our partnership with extends deep into the mists of pre-history. We and they have co-evolved to an extent to be better companions. Eating a dog is a profound betrayal unlike that of eating a horse. Come at me
I am OK with some cultures not eating some meats: pork for the muslims or jews, horse for some Western countries, sometimes rabbit. Where I'm from (Italy) we eat both horse and rabbits. But I too draw the line at eating dogs and cats, except during extreme survival situations where it's eat your pet (or fellow human) to avoid starvation. I feel eating canids and felids as taboo as eating a primate, or eating a human.
Really, dogs, primates, and humans should be the only animals that are okay to eat.
Otherwise you're saying that it's okay to kill and eat thinking, feeling creatures as long as they're sufficiently different from yourself.
Plus, only humans can consent to being eaten— In theory, anyway, though I wouldn't want to see any system that claims it can actually respect that honestly.
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 artif…
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.
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I, too, like cycling around with my shotgun. It nicely complements the spandex outfit.
Missed opportunity here. I found a number of gun racks for bikes, but no hardpoint mounts for gun turrets on bikes.
For when you need to deliver a really, really important message.