Humans would make lousy pets. We’re as independent minded as cats, plus we have the ability to reason and opposable thumbs. We…er, at least some of us, including me…will find ways to kill whatever it is that is keeping us as pets.
Somebody needs a tummy rub.
<cat imitation>
mmm, belly rubs purrr…purrrr ohmygodhandmustdie [slashes with claws and runs away]
</cat>
Humans wouldn’t put up with being kept as pets, we’re way too intelligent. We could be kept as slaves, but that’s a completely different kind of relationship. And we do seem to have a knack for eventually overthrowing our masters.
The Romans used to keep children as pets. They thought it was charming to feed them from the table, and dress them up like living dolls. Then, when they became older, they were sold off without a trace of sentimentality (cite: A History of Private Life, Vol I). We can see this as typical Roman inhumanity, but consider that in contemporary society we stop adding our own children’s photos to family albums after they hit puberty and often find their company unbearable in general.
According to an old story, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had a baby taken from its mother and raised by nurses who kept entierly silent, as an experiment to see if the child would use Hebrew, Latin or Greek, to prove which is man’s “natural” language. The baby died, supposedly from emotional neglect; but even if the story is true, it took place in a time of high infant mortality.
Nope. They’d make GREAT pets!
When I met my (now) husband, my car sported a bumper sticker saying: “All men are animals, but some make good pets.” He didn’t notice it right away, and wondered why, when he drove, he got lots of honks and waves. 
The simplest thing here would be to use the alien’s equivalent to carpet flooring; basically any available absorbent floor surface, and simply drag one’s ass along it until sufficiently clean/relieved of ass discomfort.
Then use our superior Human Climbing Abilities to flee to a high place unreachable by angry alien owners when they discover their flooring zigzagged by shitsmears :eek:
I could only imagine their version of ‘Its me or the dog’ called ‘Its me or the Human’ involving lonely spinster aliens spoiling their ill-behaved human pets:
“He won’t stop masturbating!”
“I feed them plenty to make them healthy, but it just seems to make them round and lethargic”
“We got two males wanting them to fight. But all they do is hump each other!”
“Our female keeps hitting its cub. I thought they were supposed to care for their young?”
“He still won’t stop masturbating!”
“We bought our male an exercise wheel; somehow it ended up collecting dust in our basement, meanwhile our alcoholic beverages keep going missing and our male just sits and stares at the holo-vid all day instead of running in his wheel”
“We like to give our human alcohol because it seemed to mellow her out. But now all she wants to drink is alchol and she’s become irritable and cries a lot!”
"Its so cute how they try to bite us with their stubby little jaws. Unfortunately I think we teased our human too much and now he’s gotten kind of good at biting shows alien riddled with human bite marks
“We bought him a female companion, but he kept masturbating. We gave him a piece of fruit to distract him, but all he did was poke a hole inside it and hump it.”
Hmm…lying around all day doing nothing but eating, drinking, pooping and occasionally licking something; sounds like most guys on a Sunday afternoon. My bet is that men would be better pets; hell, even now if you throw a ball, most men run after it and throw it back.
Women, on the other hand, would be a bit high-strung and needy, but probably easier to keep clean and housebreak. Plus women pets would probably let you dress them up in silly outfits when you take them for a walk whereas men pets would rather just go out naked and sniff butts.
We don’t normally keep wild animals as pets, so I doubt aliens would, either: We turned wolves into dogs and wild cats into housecats, so aliens would have to turn humans into some human-like domestic animal we’ve never observed.
Opposable thumbs? How quaint. Our opposable thumbs might allow us to make quite a mess now and then, but since humans don’t have the ability to Zrrrrkslslskskkkkk we’d be pretty much at their mercy.
Well, I think I have enough trouble keeping the dog off the couch, I don’t think a pet human would respect the strategically placed baby gate like the dog does.
I’m sure I could think of numerous other issues there would be in having an opposably thumbed semi? intelligent pet.
Many people have mentioned opposable thumbs as something we humans would use to cause problems with. How do we know that the AKC (Alien Kennel Club) doesn’t allow thumb docking as part of the standard?
I’ve associated with several dogs that thought I made a fine pet; they trained me to cater to their desires, feed them when they demanded feeding, provide them with medical care, housing, etc., etc.
No, no, no, you don’t want pet humans. I tried raising a couple from birth and it seemed like years before I could get them to stop pooping and peeing at inappropriate times. And if you try to leave them alone while you go to work they will scream so much that the neighbors will call the cops.
After a few years of that, when they finally can move around on their own and feed themselves somewhat you still have to watch them like a hawk. They will break things, fight with each other, short circuit electrical appliances, etc. How any of them ever reach maturity without killing themselves is a wonder.
They will learn to talk to you, and you might think, ‘ah, communication will solve everything!’. But you would be wrong about that. In fact you will learn that you are wrong about most everything and you will remain wrong for about 20 years.
Don’t even get me started on the costs of the endless accessories.
Fish are nice, get an aquarium.
Oh yeah?
Gimmee a piece of that there fruit and I’ll show you how well a human Zrrrrkslslskskkkkks. 
Aw, how cute, he thinks you can Zrrrrkslslskskkkkk a fruit.
To the OP… lousy pets.
We already have an example: chimpanzees. They’re not as smart as humans, they’re stronger than us, but on balance, they’re roughly analogous. And they make TERRIBLE pets.
We are social animals. We can live without human contact for a time, especially if we’re prepared to do so, but it’s the rarest of individuals who can do so for any length of time without going bonkers.
Physically, we’re helpless in the first years of life. A pet is one thing; a pet baby is a pain in the ass. Perhaps the aliens outsource the first few years to robots, or leave the young with their pet parents until they’re yanked away.
That said, the ultimate reason we wouldn’t make great pets is that we’ve evolved to the point that we know better than that. Dogs and cats are smart, but they don’t mind being pets. Humans would likely recoil from such things; even when raised in an entirely alien culture, we’re still human.
In comparison with chimps, humans would make much better pets. Humans are much less aggressive, not as strong, and are much more easily housebroken.
It’s true that a human pet would require an immense amount of care and social interaction, the owner would essentially have to commit to the same level of care that a human parent provides a human child.
Of course, as with raising a chimp, the hard part comes when the human reaches sexual maturity. Then you get all sorts of issues that any human parent of human teenagers will recognize.
The problem is that we have no idea what sort of resources these aliens have at their disposal, or what sort of role the humans are going to fill in the alien household. Are the humans going to have some sort of job–akin to guard dogs, herding dogs, and other working dogs? Or pure companionship? And are the humans going to be exclusively socialized with aliens, or with other humans too?
And sexual maturity is going to be a bigger problem for human pets than for most animals, since human mating patterns are so different than most mammals. No breeding season, hidden estrous, pair bonding, and so on. But still, if I were an alien I’d choose humans over chimps or gorillas or orangutans in a second.
I think humans would make poor guard animals. Our hearing, night vision, and sense of smell isn’t nearly as acute as many of our terrestrial counterparts. We can walk far, but don’t think we’d make practical draft animals; however if we were pets in some sort of nomadic alien culture (who for whatever reason were constantly on the move) I think our bodies would be well adapted to walking long distances to keep up with our alien owners. This might give us some appeal if much of their indigenous life didn’t have the endurance to do the same and were too bulky to be carried along.
If we think of it from a human point of view, we could theoretically end up as their equivalent of ‘purse dogs’ where we’d be mostly interacting with aliens, occasionally coming in contact with other humans-
"Are we going to the park? I think we’re going to the park! YES! I’m so excited! Hey, hey Xyzzzik! hey HEY! there’s another human in that other hovership! Hey Other Human! FUCK YOU! :mad: "