Not every slave was made to work on the cotton fields. Slavery comprises every situation where one human being is treated as the property of another. It is irrelevant whether the slave is allowed to live in relative comfort or forced to do hard labour. Slavery is always unfair.
My slaves get far better healthcare than I do, and their food costs more than mine on a per pound basis. They also get to shit in the yard, something that I must refrain from doing. Don’t get me started on the licking their balls thing.
If you have to redefine the key term to make you rpoint, you ar4 as much as admitting that your oringal point was bullshit.\
People value them for the company, entertainment, etc… If I wanted someone to keep me company, I would have to pay him.
Arguments based on “pets have a better life than they would have if they were roaming free” don’t hold water IMHO. If I was living in an impoverished and war-torn country, providing shelter, food and medical care to some person I enjoy the company of, not asking any work from him but also not allowing him to leave my place and expecting him to be returned to me if he wandered of/escaped, arguing that he would run the risk of being killed or starving otherwise wouldn’t fly. I would unambiguously be told that I am a criminal (especially when it would be discovered that I had him tatooed, chiped, and castrated).
The only reason why we can’t say that pets are slaves is that they aren’t human.
Slavery is a human concept, and doesn’t apply to animals (except, perhaps, a few unusual species of ants – and even this if very, very different than human slavery).
Dog’s view: They feed me, shelter me, play with me, love me. They must be gods!
Cat’s view: They feed me, shelter me, play with me, love me. I must be a god.
The bigger issue is being ignored here. Machines are slaves. We only feed our cars enough to take us places. Once they outlive their usefulness we sell them down the river or just discard them. I’ve heard stories about some car owners being kind to their slaves, but does that make up for the fact that we give them no choice to come or go as they please? If you think pets are being treated as slaves you cannot ignore the horrendous life of servitude of machines. Pets are usually considered family members, some people have even risked their lives to save a pet from a burning building, but how many people would risk their lives to save a can opener or vacuum cleaner? So sure, consider pets to be slaves if you want, but you’re ignoring the daily tragedy of enslaved machines.
Can’t generalize that. I know people who pretty much let their smartphone tell them what to do. And they would *definitely *save it from a burning building.
How about how dastardly a farmer treats his dirt … doesn’t the dirt have a choice as to what to grow? Doesn’t mean slaver farmer douse his dirt with poisons? What cruelty, what nastiness …
Is dirt then also a slave?
The real shame about this is that people waste time and energy expounding and protesting on this animal slavery nonsense when there is still plain old HUMAN slavery alive and well and still going on in the world.
Don’t you care about pets, machines, and dirt?
No…it pretty much goes off the rails early.
Of course it is. Dogs and cats don’t view the world from the same perspective a human does. Obviously. To a dog who lives there, the house he lives in is his den and the humans who live there are his or her pack. The dog thinks they are part of that pack, gives and gets security from the pack and by and large is content. Even dogs in abusive situations often will guard what they think is their territory. Cats look at the world in yet another way, but it boils down to the same thing…they are part of their humans group and take and give security from that group. These animals have been with us for literally 10’s of thousands of years now.
So, just disecting some of the first link:
We didn’t keep them around because they were cute, so right off this guy is either spinning the story or is ignorant. Logically, humans who were struggling to survive (as animals in the wild constantly do) wouldn’t or couldn’t keep something that was potentially dangerous around just because it was ‘cute’…there had to be a symbiosis between early wolves/proto-dogs and early humans, something that both sides perceived as a benefit to them and an aid to their survival and ability to propagate. Since this relationship has lasted not 10’s of thousands of years I’d say that it was a good move on both species parts, and continues to be, since both species are thriving.
So what? Dogs who are turned out by their human owners generally fare VERY badly, and most house dogs are the smaller species and would fare even less well than the larger dogs. Where I live people often lose their smaller dogs…and, basically, if they aren’t found in a day or so, hopefully by a neighbor or by animal control those dogs are never seen again. The reason is things like large hawks, cyotes, scorpions, rattle snakes and myriad other things that kill them off (this leaves aside the lack of water and extreme temperatures).
What a load of horseshit. 
The author is basically relying on ignorance and little understood history to try and make an emotional appeal for a connection that just isn’t there. And certainly isn’t something the dogs or cats themselves would make. As for escape…there are rarely posses of armed men with (irony) dogs sent out to capture run away dogs or cats, no underground rail road to get escaping dogs to free states, and no places for those escaping animals to live where they will be safe and secure, having gotten out of their ‘slavery’…instead there is basically the large probability of death in myriad ways, the low probability of another human family finding the dog or cat and taking them in, or the slightly higher probability of animal control catching them before the environment kills them.
At any rate, the whole article is like this. It’s an appeal to emotion that plays on peoples ignorance of teh subject, ignorance of history, ignorance of dog and cat psychology and physiology and basically smooths over the reality by playing on all those things to craft a montage to direct said ignorant and emotional reader down the path the author is trying to craft.
It was only recently that the Mrs. and I were able to cast away the chains of slavery when Daisy and Bella passed away a few years apart. While sad to see our Mistress’s go, it was freedom when they did.
Never again, we decided, shall we enter into servitude again.
Not sure if serious… Them not being human is a pretty important distinction. Anyway no one returns my cat to me against it’s will, he comes back when he wants to and there is plenty of evidence he freely chooses to spend time in my house, I open a door and see if he wants to come in, some times he doesn’t sometimes he does.
We also have plenty of evidence that dogs and cats get distressed when removed from their homes and families, often travelling long distances to get home. In fact can you actually tell me a single example of a well treated dog deliberately choosing to run off into the wild? They just don’t do that, if they get lost, yes people bring them back, but its not that they didn’t want to come back, its that they got lost and didn’t know how to get back.
And as for abused animals, yeah they might try to leave, but we already have laws against animal cruelty.
I refuse to be a slave to inane guilt-mongering bullshit.
What if I give you a dog biscuit and some skritchers - would you then?
Regards,
Simon Legree, At Least When It Comes to Leet the Wonder Dog[sup]TM[/sup]
My friends and family don’t spend time with me because I pay them. They spend time with me because they love me.
The facts that pets are not human is critical. It’s meaningless to talk of paying them money; htey haven’t the capacity to use or understand it. Cats tend to be very self-sufficient; they would and do go out killing birds and rodents themselves, and stay in o human’s home (to the extent that they do) out of an analog of affection or an analog of laziness. Dogs treat their owners as the leaders of their pack, replicating that natrual social order. No non-human animal cmmonly kept as a pet has the intellectual capacity to yearn for freedom in the sense a confined human does.
Calling pets slaves is basically saying their owners are exploiting them in an immoral fashion. My cats were no more exploited by the fact that I gabve them food and shelter and tolerated their killing of rodents than I am by the fact that my wife lets me have sex sith her and doesn’t want me to have sex with men.
It seems like the main point here is that humans are trying to apply human concepts to animals when they very likely have a different way of looking at the world.
But what about the spaying and neutering? Isn’t that cruel?
In what way? They use anesthetic.
No, it’s not cruel, for the same reason. Animals have no idea that they have been spayed or neutered, and therefore don’t care.
Animals are not small furry people.
Regards,
Shodan