Here it gives the two points:
How are these false? They seem like real concerns to me. It doesn’t seem like a straw man, this is how the pets live.
It’s not how well treated pets live, so it’s a straw man. You haven’t answered my question, have you ever heard of a case of a well treated pet desperately trying to escape into freedom? Do your dogs try to escape and run away every time they are outside?
You also haven’t addressed my issue about consent, I argue my cat is consenting to be my pet, because he chooses to come back to my house when he’s let out and walks freely into the door and freely comes to me for affection. What do you say to that?
Alas, yeah, my sister’s dog – a dog of very little brain – really wanted to go for a wild run all around the countryside. Once, someone slipped up, and the doggie got loose, and we had one hades of a time chasing her down and cornering her. It was all a big game, you see… It wasn’t a game to us, especially when the dog ran across the nearby highway a couple times…
(Dumb, dumb, dumb dog…)
Well, to go beyond personal accounts, I sent out a survey to 2,000 dogs, chosen at random. But none of them answered it. Maybe their owners prevented them from using a pen.
Our border collie tapped on our glass door to the backyard to signal that he wanted out. He learned to sit to signal he wanted to cross the street in the middle, so he was quite clever at expressing himself. He never once tapped on the front door. He was too smart for that, so don’t tell me we were imprisoning him.
Interesting that our oh-so-curious new poster hasn’t responded to the fact that s/he’s strongly considering points made by a certifiable psycho who thinks Charles Manson is a visionary genius who should be leader of the world. I mean, honestly? You expect us to believe you’re sincere when you take a lunatic seriously?
Look, it’s sadly true that there are certainly thousands of mistreated animals whose lives are hellish because their owners are cruel, ignorant, and/or mentally ill. We see countless cases of animals kept in horrific conditions by some ignorant or malicious people.
I recently read of a large dog kept on a short chain tied to a fence, day in, day out, with a corrugated metal cage to sleep in despite the heat of summer that turned the cage into an oven. No one ever spoke to it or petted it. When a passer-by discovered this, he noticed immediately that the dog was starved for food, for health care (it was covered in sores and parasites, and its hair was matted and filthy), and even for physical affection.
This dog was supposedly intended to be a guard dog, apparently, but the (eventual) rescuer put his hand through the fence and the dog instantly went over and put its muzzle against the stranger’s palm almost desperately. (There’s a video of this.) The stranger fed the dog and petted it whenever he passed by, and after a couple of days of this, the guy went to the owner to complain about the revolting negligence clearly going on. That’s when he learned that the dog had lived most of its life in this condition.
All this is to say: yes, this is cruelty and abuse, and I hope they threw the book at the owner (the stranger ended up buying the dog and taking it to a shelter/veterinarian for care). As far as conditions go, I would say there are similarities to slavery. It’s also similar to Sheriff Joe’s infamous tent prison out in Arizona, or the conditions at Abu Ghraib. It is, basically, torture.
That doesn’t mean normal pet ownership has anything whatsoever to do with slavery. Pet ownership is far more closely aligned with the guardian/child relationship than anything else. They are perpetual infants/toddlers. Just like children in some notorious cases, when pets are left uncared for without interaction of either other pets or humans, they turn feral, live brutish and dangerous lives, and can be nearly impossible to re-socialize.
Ours is a symbiotic relationship. Humans needed dogs and cats for hunting, protection, and vermin control; the forerunners to modern pets likely learned that these weird human creatures lived in places that offered shelter from dangerous environments (including predators of their own). It was a fair exchange, and a way to improve both sides’ own chances for regular meals. If these pre-domesticated animals didn’t want to be around humans, they possessed more than enough defensive abilities to avoid the dynamic.
All that said, I have to respectfully take issue with Skald the Rhymer’s idea that animals can’t perceive the need for freedom. That’s demonstrably false. Everything from dogs to cats to exotic birds and even frickin’ Orcas can chafe against extreme confinement and even solitude. Confined too long, dogs and cats will usually whine and bite at their surroundings, or even themselves.
I remember seeing a documentary about parrots, just a general nature documentary, not something with an agenda. One segment showed a bird who’d been left in a small cage that was too small and had no companionship of other birds, and wasn’t even spoken to. (Why people get birds is beyond me in the first place, but I sure as hell don’t understand someone buying a parrot and not talking to it.)
It was finally brought to the vet because its stupid-ass owner noticed raw patches of skin and wounds where the bird had, somewhat neurotically, plucked out its own feathers with its beak, leaving awful scars and hurting itself. Basically it had lost its marbles, to the extend that parrots have marbles, so to speak. Once out of captivity and put into a much better situation–a huge, room-sized cage with a couple of other parrots–the bird got a bit better, but it was never fully recovered.
Animals express their desires and needs all the time, and owners learn to recognize these behaviors. Anecdote time: My first cat–the one whose name I use as my SDMB ID–was an indoor/outdoor cat (not my choice; it was a dangerous thing to do, but at least we lived in a very low-traffic community).
Anyway, the point is, each day Choie made it very clear that she wanted to get out of the house. Meowing, standing by the door looking pitiful, you name it, she knew how to express herself (and how to manipulate us shamelessly! :D). We let her out and she had her fun for hours in our suburban neighborhood.
Sometimes, if I was home from school in the afternoon, I’d stand on the doorstep and, like a mother calling her kids in after a day playing, I would clap my hands and call Choie’s name. In the distance I’d hear a little happy ringing sound (we kept a tiny jingle bell on her collar, both for her own protection and for birds’ safety too) as Choie bounded home from wherever the heck she’d been hanging out.
(Note to our OP that there was literally nothing requiring her to come back. She could’ve disappeared the same way she’d arrived on our doorstep one day–out of the blue with no warning. Instead, she bounced across several lawns and pushed her way through hedges to get back to her home. And, I like to think, to me too.)
Choie also made it clear when she wanted to get inside the house, on those days when I wasn’t around to let her in. My mom (a stay-at-home mother) told me she could hear Choie yowling on the front door steps when she was done making her rounds of our neighborhood.
So yes, animals certainly have needs that they’re aware of. It may mostly be instinctive, and they’re not complex concepts equivalent to our own, but on whatever level, they do understand what they want, and that includes a desire for stretching their legs and satisfying some of their natural-born love of hunting, running, and outside stimulation. And sometimes they just want to lie beside us and get skritched between their ears.
It seems to me that you and Skald the Rhymer are using a different concept of what freedom entails. Orcas, like all living things, follow certain patterns of behavior that have been learned through generations and that have ensured the survival of the species to this day. If humans create a barrier that prevents an Orca from following these patterns of behavior, the Orca will work against it. You can call that “need for freedom”. You should, however, remember that a tree put in a flower pot will break the confinement of that pot for the very same reason. I cannot bring myself to accept that that kind of “need for freedom” is comparable to what a human slave experiences.
Uh… the concept of freedom is light years more rudimentary than calculus. I’m pretty sure early humans grasped the concept of freedom long before advanced math.
I disagree they show no evidence of the capacity to understand “freedom”. At the end of the day, you can’t just “know” when it comes to non-human animals because you aren’t one and because we haven’t developed a way to truly understand what they think.
Depends on what you mean by “freedom.” If you mean the ability to move about without constraint, sure, cats value that. But to worship as they please? Marry whomever they wish? Own an assault rifle? Publish articles critical of the Fuehrer? None of that means anything to a cat.
ETA: And housecats have a great deal of freedom anyway. They are “paid” (fed, sheltered, and doctored) in exchange for doing nothing. Many roam their nieghborhoods, terrorizing robins and rats, as they will, and move freely from multiple human households as they wish. They most assuredly are not slaves.
Some pets being overly confined does not make pet ownership equivalent to slave ownership. Some pets being abused does not make all pet owners animal abusers. A pet wanting to wander loose does not mean it wants to flee it’s home for freedom. Stopping your children from playing on the highway is not enslaving them. Humans, animals, machines, and dirt may be restricted from doing anything particular thing at any time without being enslaved. That is the inherent problem with the OP’s argument, some A are B is not the same as all A are B.
Well, most of that doesn’t mean anything to me either… so it’s a personal thing.
By freedom I mean move, eat, sleep, poop - do things you feel like doing without constraint. The most basic kind of freedom, you could say - which is what the whole “slavery” argument is based on (I’m not on either side of that argument btw, to me it’s all semantics and nothing else).
You can eat, sleep, and poop without constraints?
It is ridiculous on it’s face to say that pets are slaves.
Prisoners, maybe. Captives, to be sure. But not slaves.
I want to see what happens if he decides to poop on a lawn in the middle of a park.
Machinaforce, if you truly love your dogs, then set them free. If they come back it was meant to be, if not they probably got run over.
Yes? (unless there is a joke in there somewhere…)
Last I checked there is no one standing above my head torturing me with sleep deprivation or something… otherwise I’d consider it a considerable infringement on my freedom…
edit: also, I was referring to animals.
In terms of reproductive success, the wolves who threw their lot in with humans have done a lot better than the wolves who stayed free. That reproductive success involved becoming part of the human family.
For humans pair bonding has reproductive advantages also, and for many of us it comes naturally. If you call dog ownership slavery, you might as well call marriage slavery too. Who the master is is unclear in both cases.
[QUOTE=phantom lamb]
Yes? (unless there is a joke in there somewhere…)
[/QUOTE]
If you are an American then let’s see you drop trou and let loose in city hall or even in a crowded public park. 
Or the next time you are in a meeting at work just lift your leg.
And generally, no one is torturing their pets or depriving them of sleep either. But since you actually DO have constraints on those things, including the potential for incarceration depending on what you tried to do to exercise your freedom to poo or pee wherever you like whenever you like, does that mean you now feel your freedom in being infringed on? And, do you think that pets feel their freedom is generally being infringed on…or that they would even know or understand what that means?
That must make me a slave, then, because my cat does that on a regular basis.
I believe someone countered that already