• BovineUniversity
    ·
    6 months ago

    Why should animals be forced to live within your limits though, even if you treat them 'well'? You're trapping them in homes or even cages, they have basically no agency.

    • WithoutFurtherBelay
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      Because if they get outside they’ll get killed by a car and/or fuck up the environment

      Pets SHOULDN’T exist, but that isn’t fixable by having individuals throw “their” animals outside, it doesn’t fix anything and causes more suffering

      So I’m not “against pets” any more than someone is “against food” because they got it from a capitalist grocery store

      • BovineUniversity
        ·
        6 months ago

        Oh I'm not saying pets should all be euthanized immediately or anything, just that the pet and pet-breeding industry should be phased out with the goal of animals existing almost solely in the wild in the future.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          6 months ago

          Dogs have co-evolved to live and cooperate with humans for 40,000 years. Hanging out with us all the time is their natural environment, it is their "wilderness". Though i should also point out that you're committing the naturalistic fallacy, ie what is natural (malnutrition, mange, horrible parasite load, being killed by predators, dying due to untreated illness and injurt, being mauled by other dogs, freezing to death, bad water, scavenging carcasses, etc) is good. The concepts of "nature" and "wilderness" are also problematic; for one, dogs and cats are not wild animals. They arr domesticated. They have coevolved with humans to live in human environments under human care.

          "Wild" is a problematic concept at best. Wilderness" as popularly conceived of in the west is mostly a racist construction that serves to erase the presence and history of indigenous people. There is not and never has been a "wild" separate from the human domain. We"ve been everywhere on earth for tens of thousands of years. Much of the face of the earth has been influenced and often heavily influenced by human habitation.

          Dogs don't share some abstracted notion of freedom and independence with settler brained american libertarians. They're dogs. They want to hang out with humans who treat them well. That's their whole thing. They're fully, completely domesticated, which i suspect many "having pets is immoral" people don't fully comprehend. Frankly I think it's a misapprehension of city people who haven't really spent much time in truly wild places where the wildlife has not acclimated to human presence the way it has in most of America and Europe.

          Regardless, this abstract, idealistic notion that dogs "lack agency" is not materialist. It's also not a very strong argument from an idealistic perspective. Most of the time, being domesticated rather than wild animals, feral dogs suffer even shorter, more violent, more miserable lives than wild animals that are at least adapted to their environments. This is because they are dependent on cooperation with humans for their wellbeing. Domestication has made them more playful, less aggressive, much less shy and suspicious and cautious, much more social, given them the nearly unique abilitiy to recognize human gestures and body language, and so forth. Contrast this with wolves, which are genetically speaking a very similar species, and the massive differences in behavior, physical structure, and psychology are stark and impossible to explain away.

          Dogs cannot survive and thrive without us (and I'd argue humans are equally lost and miserable without dogs). They have no place in the world except alongside humans. Whatever assertion you're making, what you're defacto asking for is the destruction of the entire species because their mere existence doesn't conform to your idealist notions of agency and independence.

        • WithoutFurtherBelay
          ·
          6 months ago

          On one hand, I agree, on the other hand, I think forcing people to live without a cat is some kind of war crime

            • Kuori [she/her]
              ·
              6 months ago

              outdoor cats live miserable lives. if you love something you don't damn it to a short life of brutality and disease

            • WithoutFurtherBelay
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              edit-2
              6 months ago

              I mean this doesn’t make it not a war crime, regardless of if it’s the right thing to do