I would just like to comment that if you love animals, you should hate pets. The amount of animal factory farming (killing of animals often more intelligent than your canine) required to nourish a domesticated animal over the course of their lives is gross in all senses of the word gross.
Mate, if ever there was someone who needed to spend an hour rolling around with a bunch of puppies, it's you. (=
I hope you can at least understand that pets bring joy into the lives of their owners. It doesn't all have to make perfect sense.
In the grand scheme of things, we're all just temporary cosmic dust, right? And dogs are a great daily reminder to focus on the small moments of happiness whenever you can find one.
This response to the point made by the person to whom you're responding is the philosophical equivalent of plugging your ears and going "la la la can't hear you".
> In the grand scheme of things, we're all just temporary cosmic dust, right?
What else would you be able to justify using this platitude?
This is a philosophical question I hadn’t considered. Although, I eat meat, so under that umbrella I can’t hate my dog for also doing the same.
I think another perspective to consider here is how this applies to rescue dogs. I rescued my dog, but from your pov it would’ve been a better idea to euthanize her to spare the lives of all the other animals she would’ve consumed in her lifetime.
Few more things that come to mind:
1. Nature does not reward for smartest, but for the fittest. Which is interesting in itself
2. Argument could be made the same for humans (there are some people that are not worth the life of a farm animal, for example). But also one could say that the summed intellect of all animals that have been killed for consumption for one person in their life time may be net more than that person’s intelligence
Yes, rescue makes no difference.
I don’t know that nature rewards anything. But with our power to make moral judgments comes a response to do so.
Yes, you could make the same argument for humans. I’m an antinatalist and so should everyone be too.
This was the argument I had with my wife over getting a cat. Eventually she decided ended up with a stray off the street. But there is always that element of, as Joe Rogan called it, "opening a can of murder" every time you feed them.
I am not for pet owner ship as a broad concept because of this feeding pattern but there is that issue of once they are here - then what? So long as we can get their numbers down then that is a good start. At the moment we are in a predicament, with a solution a while off.
