Wife and kids trump Mac as lovely as he is.
I guess you and I just imagined the situation differently. I envisioned something like walking through hell with fire and brimstone and angry demons chasing us. I assumed that choosing to not immediately abandon my animal and board the ship would quickly result in a painful death.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like you envisioned something out of a bad Jim Carrey movie, where you assumed some chance of survival for an extended period of time if you chose to stay.
Yeah, I didn’t see it that way. If the question amounts to “If there were only one seat on the lifeboat, would you give it to your dog” puts a different spin on it.
A Jim Carrey movie? Fido’s on his own!
Seriously, I suppose I saw just enough wiggle room in his scenario to leave a chance of survival. And I just could not abandon my dogs there. I could not. I suspect I would take my own life soon after escaping, unable to handle the guilt.
I left the wiggle room on purpose. I mean, if I’d written You and the dog are in a burning house, and you don’t know where the dog is but think it’s probably upstairs, and you are downstairs, and the staircase is on fire and you are not Spider-Man, then the choice is obvious to all but the mad.
Really easy decision. I’d get on the boat. And when I got home I’d get to have a kitten again.
Win, win, maybe lose (depending on whether my current cat is going to be harmed or simply deprived of going home with me).
Based on the way I read it, it is. Either you get out and the pet stays, or you both stay and “you’ll soon be either mad or dead,” which leaves the pet in exactly the same predicament as if you’d abandoned it when you had the chance to get out, only now *you’re *fucked, too.
Not even. I’d say it’s, “If there were only one seat on the lifeboat, would you take it, or would you drown with your pet?”
I didn’t see any wiggle room at all. “You have no reason to think you’ll ever have another chance to get out of this situation,and every reason to think that, if you stay in this strange land any longer, you’ll soon be either mad or dead.” That seems pretty straightforward to me. 'Cause if I can wiggle out of the “mad or dead” part, what’s to stop me from wiggling out of the “can’t get the pet home” part, thereby negating the entire premise?
You have no reason to think X is not QUITE the same as saying X is true.
It’s the same thing when it comes to decision-making. If an employer has no reason to think that you’re qualified for the job, you’re not going to get it no matter how qualified you actually are.
To say that we have no reason to believe something implies that we have exhausted all possible avenues of reason and have come to the conclusion that the given thing is impossible. So maybe it’s just me, but to say that I have no reason to believe I’d ever have another chance to get home means that I have expended all of my available resources and tried everything I could possibly think of and I truly and honestly believe that abandoning my dog and boarding the ship is my one and only way home. If I had even the slightest hope that there might be another way, then I would have at least one reason not to get on board, and 1 > 0. 
So I’ll put it this way. If there is at least a shred of hope for my survival and ultimate escape, I would stay with my dog. However, if staying meant I definitely would die alongside my dog in the very near future, I would leave him.
I would abandon my current pet and any pet I’ve ever owned. But I would NOT be happy about it.
Hmm. At this point, we’re discussing, as much as anything else, what hope means. One can choose to hope–that is, to act as if there were the possibility of a good outcome–even when one does not feel the emotion of hope.
Let’s say I was in the OP situation with a child I loved, and the callous captain made the demand of me. I know that the child cannot possibly survive without me (and is, in fact, probably less capable of taking care of himself that my cats would be). I would still choose to stay in the child, hoping, as a verb, that my judgment of the situation is wrong.
I’d be willing to do that for a kid, but not my cats.
Fully agree. I guess it would be much easier for me to have hope if it was a child than it would if it was a dog (or other animal).
Probably if enough of us stay behind with our pets we can make it a better place.
My sole current pet is a goldfish, and I’m not very attached to him. Good luck, fishie. On the other hand, I would have had a real hard time abandoning the dog I had for 15 years.
Some of them care intensely. If you’ve ever rescued a really traumatized dog, you’ll know that he or she wants, much more than food, to know that you will be a good pack leader – that you will be present, and kind, and know what to do.
Yeah, I’ve done that (also for a snapping turtle on a superhighway).
Hrm…I smell a business opportunity. I wonder if ratfuck.com is registered?
Yeah. I’m starting to wonder if some of the people responding to this thread would have stood with Churchill in 1940, because there’s very little chance of ever winning, or stuck to their guns in Bastogne, or shivered through Valley Forge, or hauled the colors back up on the Bonhomme Richard.
And other people (me, but I’m everyman) are thinking some people way overvalue their pets if abandoning one is a decision par with giving up on saving Europe from Hitler.
Honeyplease. There is a world of difference between “you have *very little chance *of surviving” and “you have no reason to think you’ll survive.” We may be splitting semantic hairs here, but I think they’re important ones.
ETA: There’s also a huge difference between fighting to save your life and the lives of a bunch of other people against long odds, where not fighting means a whole lot more death and possibly eventually yours as well, and taking a 100% chance to save yourself over an (apparently) 100% chance to die.
I reject the notion that remaining in the OP’s scenario is equivalent to 100% chance to die. That would be a very uninteresting poll indeed. You can’t seriously think I’m arguing that i would just instantly die rather than face the choice. The OP is interesting only if one is choosing to face uncertainty.
Then **Skald **should have phrased it less ambiguously.
I’d abandon my pets. I’d feel guilty about it, but the choice as I see it is stay and MAYBE survive a miserable existence, or get the hell out and have a much higher chance of LIVING. There are very few humans I’d choose to stay for, much less a pet. Even if you do survive, your pet is likely going to die in a few years, leaving you all alone. It’s not like choosing to stick around for your child or human companion, who you could reasonably expect to be with you for a long time.
I really was trying to phrase things so that the hypothetical person thought she or he was probably doomed, but could possibly have been wrong.
In penance I will watch a hip-hop video of your choosing on YouTube. No Marshal Mathers, though.