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?
Concerning cats, I'm specifically talking about imprisonment and mutilation. Cats are social roaming animals and many are kept staring out windows of small apartments and run for the door every time it's opened hoping for escape. Mutilation occurs regularly to keep them from procreating. All of this is socially accepted by humans. If a cat is running around free and being fed and sheltered by humans, no problem, but obviously this can lead to issues with feral populations that don't mix well with civic engineered spaces.
Indeed. A year ago I purchased a working/field line golden retriever from a reputable breeder (pm me if interested) and embarked on training my first gun dog. We've done a few hunting trips this season and I found myself telling my father the other day something along the lines that I don't really care for the _hunting_ so much as I find something primal and natural about the symbiotic relationship that I've formed with this dog, especially when we hunt together. It's like he knows his chances of survival are better if we work this out together. I fail to articulate the feeling well.
And as a parent comment suggested a slavery relationship... I don't know.. If so, I've got a pretty well pampered and happy slave dog.
Just speculation but I imagine there was already symbiosis between humans and wolves long before people treated dogs as pets, livestock, or property. Semi wild dogs eating our food waste will also keep down rat and other pest populations and bark if potentially dangerous strangers suddenly show up. Win win, so no reason for us to drive them off, or for them to leave. I’ve seen this relationship in modern times in small rural muslim communities where people do not interact with the dogs for religious reasons, but are willing to let them live around their homes.
I don't contend with your view at all, and agree completely. I've spent lots of time in the Middle East and know exactly what you're speaking of. I actually happened upon this article the other day, whicj I found interesting regarding early symbiosis[1]. I'm not a biologist, so I can't speak to the subject a whole lot.
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.
