Yes I understand…knowingly breed and keep an animal in captive while trying to argue it loves and enjoys it’s natural habitat in your modern house; with guise of I’m protecting it from the ‘elements’ of life. Yes…sad same argument was used in human trading.
:smack: What?
A theory IS an explanation of FACTS.
What are you not getting? You are using the wrong definition of theory.
You didn’t read the thread in entirety but I’ve corrected myself regarding that comment - was meant to be deriving from carnivores.
According to my parents’ local ordinances regarding rabies, animal refers to cats, dogs and vietnamese pot-bellied pigs.
Bears are omnivorous btw…like, you know, humans. 
They aren’t related except extremely remotely to wolves and have no relation at all to dogs.
Domestic animals chose the house over life in the wild (literally, in many cases. My parents’ cat was a stray and moved into their house of its own accord). Did human slaves choose their captivity similarly? I was under the impression that force was used, and without it they’d run away - a far cry from cats and dogs, which don’t.
now it’s all about semantics lol again…at what point was it ok to keep them captive in order to enjoy this so called mutual benefits?
you almost divided by zero there. if wolf is related to dogs…:smack:
Yeah, about at the same point that humans are related to bears and wolves. We all had a common ancestor…probably something that looked like a rat. Again, you do yourself no favors by trying to mock things that it’s clear you don’t get.
Are you drunk? :dubious:
Naw, it’s just underscoring your obvious ignorance. You keep demonstrating that ignorance repeatedly, and obviously you don’t want to education yourself on any of this stuff, nor have a rational discussion.
So, just to expand on this, yes…bears are related to dogs. When I said they have no relation to bears I was speaking more psychologically then evolutionarily, and really addressing your point about carnivores (which bears aren’t) . Dogs are related to bears in the same way that bears are related to humans, or monkeys are related to wood chucks.
A lack of understanding of the minds and behaviors of animals is something common to all the Animal Rightists I have ever encountered.
.
I hope everyone is aware that this is a large and growing modern phenomenon, the OP has many compatriots; P.E.T.A. is their organization, at least in the US. In my opinion it is a logical development of the commonplace anthropomorphizing of animals: pets aren’t parallel to permanent human children as most people semi-consciously believe, they are really parallel to adult humans, and should be thought of and treated as such.
The person who developed the hypothesis that dogs originally were wolves who “chose” to become commensal to (with?) human beings was Raymond Coppinger. He presents convincing arguments based on global research on pariah dogs, that, 30 or more thousand years ago, wolf packs lingered around human campsites to scavenge, and that the least fearful wolves got the most offal, hence selection for tameness. Aggressive behavior towards humans was selected against (those wolves were killed). Hence, selection for unaggressiveness.
It also created wolves with small brains and teeth (eating garbage doesn’t require a lot of creativity or dentition), which is pretty much what dogs are.
Selection for lack of fear response and mild temperament incidentally creates a certain appearance in canids, see the famous Russian fur-fox breeding experiment which accidentally produced white markings and drop ears in foxes by selecting for tameness – these are signs of, I’m not remembering the word – incomplete development of adult traits (white markings at extremities in this case are caused by uncompleted pigment development in the womb). That is, dogs are incompletely-adult wolves because that helps them fit into human society.
Pariah dogs worldwide still are not domesticated in our commonly understood sense of the word.They still live off garbage and human feces, and humans do not select their mates or keep them alive deliberately, yet they are still with us. These, Ray Coppinger posits, are the original dogs living in their original state.
Dogs try to be useful, because they are social animals and include us in their society. Probably they tagged along with hunters and made themselves useful there, and sounded the alarm in the camp before humans were aware of danger, and eventually became useful controlling flocks and herds when those became domesticated, using their wolfy skills. Plus, you know, they cleaned up the garbage. Eventually people started selecting them for specific useful qualities and more fully adopting them into human culture.
Their reward for being useful was to stay alive and get fed. It’s not slavery, it’s more like gainful employment, but it is actually a specific and unique relationship that humans have with dogs, not really like any other species. Dogs are not a deliberate human creation, but they cannot exist without us. They are so old with us that it is not much of a stretch to say that our evolution was influenced by dogs as much as the other way around. Why is our sense of smell so poor, for example?
One last thing: pets are common to all human societies, no matter how ancient or ‘primitive’. The impulse seems to be intrinsic to human beings. I think it will outlast assaults upon it by humanitarians.
I think you are the only person I ever met and maybe one of the few in the history of the world that doesn’t know that dogs came from wolves and not bears. How could someone that claims to care so much about dogs that they make up these complex slave/master arguments not be aware of how they were domesticated in the first place? That is not a simple or trivial error, it is a gap in knowledge on a scale that is rarely encountered here.
When I was a kid, we always had two or three cats in the house. They were all free to come and go as they pleased. And yes, a couple of them did decide to go and not come back. But most of them, though they might go on occasional vacations, always came back after a few days. A creature can hardly be a slave that’s free to go at any time.
It was OK when we first began domesticating animals, and has continued to be OK to the present day.
Because it is mutually beneficial.
Why not?
Regards,
Shodan
Let’s not forget the obvious: cats and dogs are very, very furry. They’re really just asking for it - being all cute and fuzzy like that.
Having sources of food more reliable than hunting or foraging is a huge evolutionary advantage. Sturdy shelter against predators and the elements is a huge evolutionary advantage. Humans achieved these advantages by evolving opposable thumbs and intelligence. Dogs achieved these advantages by evolving adorable, lovable faces.
Removing domestication from dogs would be exactly equivalent to removing evolutionary advantages from any other animal. It makes as much sense as clipping the wings off of all birds or removing all sharks’ teeth.
People (sane people) don’t want to attach the word slavery to the relationship between pets and their owners because words mean things. Diluting a word’s meaning hinders our ability to effectively communicate. Sure, all humans are animals, but that doesn’t encourage us to retire the word “human” because that would hinder our ability to discuss specifics of humans.
Similarly, “slavery” is a word for a relationship in which both sides gain some type of benefit, although not necessarily an equal benefit, but its meaning is more specific than that. It implies that one side of the relationship is taking free will away from the other, and therefore it does not apply in relationships in which one party does not posses free will to begin with. It also implies that one party asserts dominance over the other party, when the parties naturally have the potential to be equals. Therefore it does not apply when one party is incapable of being equal to the other. Nuances like this are what give the word “slavery” its specific, useful value, and are what differentiate the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slaves from the one between Mr. Jefferson and his dog.
I think it would actually help to have your definition of what a slave is. To my mind it involves a state of involuntary servitude, such that given the option the slave would leave its servitude to pursue a more free existence. As has been mentioned repeatedly in this thread, very few pets would choose freedom over their current situation, unless that situation is abusive.
Consider my own situation. In order to be fed I have to work several hours each day and then rely on the local Safeway to determine whether or not I get to eat. As much as I might like to I can’t into my neighbors house and watch his flatscreen TV without authorization. Now to be liberated I could be dropped naked into my natural environment of the Sarengeti where I would last maybe a week before becoming lion bait.
According to your definition it appears that I am a slave of modern society. In which case I say thank god for slavery, and that it is only a subset of involuntary slavery, not that experienced by most pets, that is immoral.
This is a fantastic post, Ulfrieda! And I find it interesting that the OP harps so much on “captivity” and “selective breeding” when both of those are optional (and generally rather late) features of domestication. As you so nicely point out, no one’s controlling the breeding of pariah dogs - but they are DOGS, not wolves. And they’re fully free to come and go as they will; they stick around human settlements by choice, not because of coercion.
And the same is true of many other domestic animals. Many people own mutts as pets rather than purebred dogs. Most cat owners don’t own purebred cats; they own random-bred animals.
And most domestic animals (not simply dogs and cats) have traditionally lived in conditions where they could wander away without a lot of effort. Chickens were traditionally left free to roam. Goat and sheep herders are there more to protect the flock from predators than to keep the animals from running away. Most animals are quite content to hang out in a safe space where food’s readily available, which nicely describes an early human village.
Maybe what is bothering the OP isn’t so much domestication as the exploitative conditions of modern “factory” farming, and urbanization in general, which has made it unsafe for both pets and small children to roam as freely as they once did?