Honestly, I’m being honest, you need to touch grass. Humans have domesticated animals and lived with them since time immemorial. I feel like you have just never experienced the companionship and pure unadulterated joy having a pet can bring you. Genuinely I haven’t ever seen such a strange take from someone regarding pets. Now I do agree some people ought not have pets, or they do get pets that are “too much” for them and they don’t realize it. But your argument is strange and goes against the whole of human history.
Also humans are top of the food chain purely bc we are endurance hunters (basically we can run longer than our prey and effectively tire them out long before we tire out ourselves).
Again, I feel like maybe closing your laptop and going out and speaking with normal people and maybe even petting a dog / cat / rabbit etc would do you some good. Look into health benefits of having animals, the benefits to children, etc, and maybe you’ll start to understand.
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(he/him) @chiraag@mastodon.online@PM_me_trebuchets @tributarium While domestication of several plant and animal species is clearly a "thing" when looking at human history (many of our most common crops are domesticated, for example), the shift from nominally seeing your pet as a partner (in, say, hunting, which is what dogs were originally domesticated for) to an object to be owned is *much* newer (and problematic IMO).
@PM_me_trebuchets @tributarium It's particulary problematic with pets because we see fit to *literally cut off their ability to reproduce*, among other things. People say pets are like family, but if you locked your child up in the house (for their safety, ofc) and neutered them without their consent, you would be thrown in jail for child endangerment.
All imma say to this is a dog is not and never will be and cannot physically be the same as a human being. You lost me with this right here. I’m not abusing my dog by having her fixed.
@PM_me_trebuchets But what gives you the right to decide if your pet is allowed to reproduce? And I'm not the one claiming pets are part of my family - pet owners are! So it makes sense to examine whether that actually holds up upon closer scrutiny.
@PM_me_trebuchets Not to mention stuff like declawing (for the convenience of the *owner*, we rip out cat's claws?!) or locking up pet birds (not to mention 'exotic' pets, a.k.a. wild animals!). In so many ways, pets are treated as objects whose agency is denied.
Can you be normal for one second? Do you hear yourself speak? How far removed from reality are you?
@PM_me_trebuchets You're not actually addressing my points. What gives you the right to determine whether your pet is allowed to reproduce?
@PM_me_trebuchets Also, if I were 'normal', I would have accepted the meat, dairy, and egg industries as 'normal' and not at all exploitative. That is, I would not be vegan. But I actually like to think about these things and question my assumptions, even if it's uncomfortable.
I agree with you that factory farms are abhorrent and need to be addressed. But me having a dog as a pet isn’t me abusing the aforementioned dog.
@PM_me_trebuchets I contend that the whole notion of ownership of animals (as sentient beings) is immoral, no matter how good the conditions. That's what I'm trying to get at here.
Because I am my dogs caretaker, and I have determined that her getting pregnant is not good, because neither she nor I could care for that many dogs, because it is hard on her body, and because I could not afford to take care of her + all her pups. It’s irresponsible of me to allow her to reproduce in this scenario.
@PM_me_trebuchets That fundamentally isn't your decision to make though. You sterilize her for your convenience. Isn't that messed up? You chose to own her, so now you get to decide if and when she has puppies - that feels like a messed up construction to me at its most basic level. The choice only goes one way, which means that when owner's wishes and pet's wishes collide, the owner gets their way, no matter what the cost to the pet.
If you aren’t a troll you’re behaving like one. “Shut up, be normal, go outside” aren’t arguments.
Nobody is going to be able to convince you unless they come to understand where you stand on the morality of human beings being able to dominate and restrict one another’s freedoms or on the richness of the interiority and moral value of non-human animals and tediously go through a deconstruction of the status quo worldview. Because, again, we’ve already gone through these questions and generally come to similar conclusions.
As a general heuristic in life if I directly benefit from something, and especially if someone else affected by my profiteering can’t talk back to me, I see that as a flashing red light saying I need to question things and can’t take my motivated intuitions as fair conclusions.
I’m not a troll, I’m just baffled over how y’all think of pet owners, and how out of touch and tone deaf nearly everyone has been. I genuinely didn’t realize I was on the vegan sub, which should explain some of these exceptionally strange borderline soup-for-brains zero critical thinking involved takes are coming from. I’m going to do myself a favor (and you, so I never accidentally comment here again) and block this sub.
Nothing says critical thinking like stumbling into a thread, insulting everyone, repeatedly announcing intuitions and entitlements without engaging any argument because duh, of course the mainstream view (that non-human animals do not deserve full respect/autonomy/consideration as individuals, that my self-serving intuitive projection of an animal’s feelings is accurate) is self-evidently correct without any need to justify it, and then blocking the sub.
I obviously do not belong here, as my ideals do not align with yours. Is this not preferable for you, the person who actually comes here to discuss veganism, etc, that someone like me with widely different opinions stay in my own lane? I genuinely didn’t realize I was in the vegan sub. I’m still learning how to navigate this site.
It’s not that I’m not down for critical thinking or even arguing opposing viewpoints, that’s not it. It’s just that genuinely I think y’all’s arguments are… you act like I don’t want animals to have good lives or something purely because I know they are not my equal. A dog ≠ a human. To me, it’s odd you would think that. Be offended, I don’t care. One of us has a grasp on reality and bucko is isn’t you.
@PM_me_trebuchets @tributarium Question: what exactly do you hope to achieve by barging in and insulting anyone who questions your (perhaps motivated) reasoning? You are a textbook example of how not to have an actual conversation. Instead of actually engaging with the points being made (and giving the reasons you disagree with them), you instead stoop to insulting people who are trying to have an actual conversation with you.
Go outside and touch grass, my friend. Anger is bad for you :)
Dogs are a special case when it comes to arguing about contemporary pet ownership imo because of their uniquely entangled history with humans. (Human beings have had relationships with other animals “since time immemorial”–both prey/predator relations as well as cooperation like the Hadza honeyguide bird–but to my knowledge domestication per se is quite a new phenomenon. “Domestication” itself is a pretty polysemous term that needs further defining ig.) But that said, even though I absolutely tend towards thinking of foraging, pre-agricultural life as a space of strong egalitarianism, including on an interspecies level–perhaps to the point of idealising or romanticising–I don’t think anyone can presume to understand those early dynamics. I’d like to think dogs were partners rather than property, but I don’t know. I think in any case the truth cannot help but be more complicated than the attitude of “my pet is my baby and I love him and he loves me with his cute eyes and that’s the natural order of things!”
Yeah I’m holding my ground on this one. You have clearly, clearly never had a pet (or if you have, perhaps you didn’t bother forming a relationship with them?), because if you had ever seen your dog lose it’s mind when it’s so happy to see you, or felt your cat come up into bed and curl up next to you, things I don’t force them to do, but things they do because I’ve fostered a loving relationship with them.
Your opinion is weird and bad and again, I think maybe being around animals more may help you? I’m trying hard not to be mean but my god it just sounds like you need to again get off the internet and live actual life.
Are you vegan or do you agree with the critiques of speciesism in other contexts?
“Stop typing, I believe nothing that you say about your history or what you’ve seen” doesn’t inspire much engagement in any case but there are some premises that I & this community generally take for granted that you…may not.
I’m actually not vegan and I didn’t realize I was on the vegan sub (I’m not sure what to call it on lemmy). I used to be vegetarian but for health reasons I had to stop.
But I’m not dumb, and I know a dog ≠ a human. I don’t believe in souls or any of that crap, but you have to be on something really strong to equate the two. I firmly believe in treating animals well and I’m against factory farming, animal testing, etc. We as a society need to do better for animals bc they’re living beings too.