…We’ve committed a multi-thousand year long genocide against dogs, breeding them for traits that we find useful, and usually killing the puppies that don’t possess useful traits…
Maltese covered in tumors at 8 years old? That’s totally normal. Just like the cancer it inevitably will develop.
Meanwhile feral dog breeds can live up to 17 years just like wild wolves do. Though in the wild, the average lifespan is 5 years. Because of disease or injury.
Sorry to disappoint you, but even just picking your partner off of looks is literally a form of eugenics if you preach being attracted to your partner… Parents who decide to abort a fetus with a terminal illness is ALSO literally and directly eugenics.
Eugenics itself isn’t bad, it’s just certain morons think THEY deserve to decide such things for and about others.
no that’s part of natural selection. it’s our biology telling us what we want. eugenics is systemic planned pairing and breeding. it’s also had the ideas that a person’s quality is defined at birth baked into it from the start. it’s based on the concept of a person’s worth being defined by the circumstances of their birth and not by their efforts in life.
also, actual science tells us that the best thing to “breed for”,if that’s the way you want to look at life, is genetic diversity. the healthiest stock has the most diverse gene pool. something every eugenicist also somehow manages to ignore that and deny that if improving or genetics is our goal we should be trying to all become a neutral brown and choose people the most different from us genetically.
cause that’s the thing about dog breeds. we can engineer the perfect biological hunting machine… that dies by age 11 at the latest. because breeding for a trait never creates healthy offspring. which makes sense, we weren’t breeding for health. the natural desire of most parents is a healthy child. it’s what nature optimized for. when we start looking for other traits we tend to fuck it up.
Eugenics is not inherently bad, it’s just frequently used as an excuse to do really evil shit.
Eugenics is bad because it’s based on fundamentally incorrect ideas about how genetics plays into personal development. Galton drew specifically upon the fundamentally incorrect ideas of scientific racism, and wrote about Eugenics as being a means to better improve the superior races. Galton argued that things like poverty and mass suffering could have been solved this way, essentially arguing that it was the personal incompetence of the less fortunate which lead them into misfortune (also fundamentally incorrect).
Even if you drop the baggage of scientific racism, Eugenics is still conceptually ableist, choosing to eliminate those we deem disabled rather than finding solutions to better their lives.
On top of that, we were kind of hinging on sequencing the human genome giving us the insight to how genetic diseases work, the single possible case that eugenic thought might have had a use in. This has since fallen through. Further research into genetics has also demonstrated just how unreadable DNA is right now. We are still nowhere near being able to predict most genetic diseases based on the genetics of a couple.
I also cannot think of a single thing that eugenics implies should be done that isn’t absolutely evil. I’d argue that things that only encourage evil actions are themselves evil.
That last part may need a bit of citation, but yes modern breed standardization has unfortunately crippled many of the poor creatures from birth.
Adopt rescues, people! It’s usually super cheap and they’re almost always healthier dogs anyway.
Its the cats that we don’t deserve.
They just happen, they adopt us, use us as slaves, indoctrinate us in a cat worshipping cult, …
Cats are ancient aliens. That’s why Egyptians worshipped them, that’s why their pee glows and why their scratches and bites are so toxic. They’re not of this earth. Don’t trust them! They’re trying to take over and they’re being allowed to win!!
If wishing for an alien feline overlord is wrong, I don’t want to be right!
If you leave out the fact that we also breed them till their eyes pop out of their sockets, their brains don’t fit in their skulls, they are in constant fear of suffocating. Then yes
They’re either this or well built, intelligent, and filled anxiety over the impending collapse of the galaxy into a black hole. "What was that?! A small tear in the fabric of the space time continuum? Demons? Maybe the cat next door is finally going to murder all of us! Ok, probably not. But maybe I should bark at whatever it is just in case. "
Some of that is poor training, they bark at unknown things until you come, and then bark to back you up when you answer the door.
What you do it wait outside until they quiet down, then come in, or if you are answering the door move them away from the door before answering.
There’s probably somebody with better training methods.
Those “monsters” from the dark were the real heroes back when — braving the orange flickering light that instinctually meant death to sneak scraps from the stabby skin-wearers… Sounds like the original D&D story to me, NGL.
domesticating wolves by campfire with just body language would be a bad ass RPG VR game
I mean, that’s what we want to believe, that it all started with someone feeding a hungry wolf, but knowing humanity it’s just as possible it started with a captured wolf and copious amounts of animal abuse.
It’s most likely that dogs/wolves just kept eating our waste, staying close to us, and after initial fights humans noticed the dogs/wolves are not being a threat, thus letting them do their thing and observing them.
Then humans eventually figured out that by observing dogs and their reactions, they could see if dogs smelled/heard something which they couldn’t. And then started to exploit that.
wolves just kept eating our waste
You may wanna edit this to say trash, it sounds like you’re saying wolves followed us around eating our shit, which afaik isn’t a theory for dog domestication.
afaik
Well… it actually is a theory. Like, all modern dogs love to eat human shit, so there’s been some evolutionary theories about how wolves/dogs of old have eaten human shit as an easy meal and thus part of their diets, and that might have aided in domestication and all that.
And now that I’ve already started to discuss dogs eating shit: My personal theory is, that rural dogs in India have human shit as a major source of their nutrition, since the sanitary conditions in many rural areas there are shitting in the bushes, and there’s a lot of village dogs…