Though you could make a similar argument for domesticated animals like dogs. Especially larger dogs. Or humans! There are a lot of things that can be dangerous to humans, especially children, when they fly off the handle.
There is always a risk. Most animals function emotionally like humans, but have no good way of communicating emotions like frustration and anger except through aggression.
But locking up animals in cages - those who easily have the capacity to understand what you are doing to them - is cruel and immoral. So you either have to live with them or leave them be in their natural habitat.
You wouldn't lock up a human either for having the capacity to harm someone else.
So if you end up with an orphaned gorilla in your care, morally you are between a rock and a hard place.
I love animals and had dogs and cats living with my family. When I had my first kid, my wife had a large dog (a mixture between a labrador and a german shepard, and probably others - she found it as a puppy attached to a rope in the forest, left to die).
The dog was extremely quiet, socialized and what not. When we brought our baby from the hospital, he was really curious. We left him sniff the baby and the dog apparently understood that the thing that was brought in was important and decided to protect it (he was sleeping in front of the baby's room and would not let any stranger approach.
I had a similar case when I was a baby - my parents left me with their dog sleeping next to my crib outside and it would just do a "woof" without even waking up if someone would approach.
And then, one day, I left the dog alone with my son. My son was in that sort of cage made of ropes he can wander in and the dog was outside. I came back to the room and I found
... the dog licking my son face pressed to the ropes (unexpected happy ending)
I was really scared because it could have been something different (my childhood friend was bit to his face by his own dog, a normal one, not pitbull style but Great Dane IIRC). Nothing ever happended but still, this was this one time where it could have had happen and it would have been MY fault, not the dog's one.
I now have a cat. Well, my family has it, we just live together. The cat does not interfere with me (except sleeping on my laptop when I am not around) and is extremely found of my younger son (14 yo). I am telling my son to never get his face that close to the cat because she will a day or another scratch him (they are running and jumping together, playing). She scratched my leg once (and would not left from under my son's bed for that day because she was probably scared of what she did) - but that could have had been my face.
Accidents happen and animals are animals. This is not something bad - just something one has to be aware of.
My parents had a husky when I was born. The moment it bit my face was the last moment it spent in the house. Lived in the garage until it was (quickly) rehomed. I don't blame it; it wasn't like it was trying to rip my face off. I think it was just trying to assert itself in the pack order ahead of me. Except the pack leaders weren't too fond of that idea.
Ironically, I now love huskies. But would also never get one, because I live in Florida and would not subject such a dog to the weather here.
My grandad raised German shepherds as police dogs. When my father was a boy one of the adolescent dogs nipped his face.
Dad tells me that when he yelled out my grandad calmly grabbed the dogs collar, walked it around the back of the barn out of the way.
My dad, recovered from the shock and not badly injured just a scratch was on his way to the barn to tell his dad that all was okay and not to be too hard on the dog when BOOM shotgun blast rang out from that direction.
Different times and a story that shocked dog loving me - but in general dogs have had that drastic selection pressure from many thousands of generations.
I love animals (especially dogs, but now that my family has that cat, I slowly soften) and I think this was absolutely the best thing to do.
As you are saying, there is the evolution aspect, but also the fact that he cut short a possible string of serious problems.
This is also the reason I am for euthanasia of animals in shelters past a month (the time left for the owners to find a dog that escaped). Keeping them in cages is torture for the animals.
It is not that they realize they will die, if this is done correctly.
This is also why I am against zoos and circuses with animals.
I think we went into some kind of multiple personality spilt when it comes to animals : we eat them after they have suffered (I eat meat myself, but I would prefer to pay more for meat from animals that were slaughtered in a human way), we do not want to stop the suffering of caged animals, we keep large dogs in small apartments, we cry when we see a lion eating a gazela in the wild, etc.
This is exactly it. The argumentation "it is still a wild animal" is fundamentally lazy and seeks to banish a random class of organism to a space where it is okay to be needlessly cruel because understanding how it works is too hard.
I cordially disagree. I counter argue that anthropomorphizing of animals is fundamentally flawed. What understanding are you talking about? That with understanding the wild animal will not kill and maim randomly? As per other comments it seems evidence is against this reasoning.
Highly experienced trainers who understand very well their animals end up dead. I think it is quite a high grounded statement to call professional zoo-keepers and related professionals lazy.
The only understanding i can see is that having wild animals as pets should be banned as they normally are in most jurisdictions.
>Highly experienced trainers who understand very well their animals end up dead.
Humans who understand other humans also get killed by humans - at rates other animals will never match.
In the ballpark of ~20,000 murders are committed every year in the US, yet even though there are 90 million dogs in that same country, only about 30 to 50 people are killed by dogs.
It would be pointless comparing the number of fatal bear attacks, because the numbers per year are usually 0-2, and usually by wild animals, not ones in captivity.
At the end of the day the most dangerous thing to a human is another human. No other animal comes remotely close.
This is because we make the right decision to not live in close proximity to lions, tigers, bears, apes and all the other menagerie of dangerous creatures we share Earth with.
> "...only about 30 to 50 people are killed by dogs"
It's not a coincidence that this number is low. We keep domestic cats and dogs as pets precisely because their propensity and - in some cases - ability to kill us is low. If bears were as commonly kept as household pets as dogs you would see a completely different result.
What is the point being made here? Humans are liable for themselves and their actions - animals are not. It ultimately doesn't matter if an animal has a justification for its actions; being unable to take responsibility for them, from a human perspective, is the biggest separator between human and animal behaviour.
Animals are liable for their actions. The punishment is usually death by lethal injection or firing squad.
The stronger argument is that animals aren't as aware as humans which actions will have consequences. Animals do have customs about what's okay and what's not, but they often don't align with human society's laws.
It's "ignorance of the law is no excuse" taken to an extreme.
I don't really agree. While humans can and do punish animals, it doesn't follow that the animal itself is liable for its own actions. In pretty much all cases, the owner of the animal is the one liable - and animals without owners are liable to nobody. An animal without an owner might still be killed - for example, if it is a danger to people - but I don't think you can call that just punishment.
For another argument, consider that if you went into the woods and were mauled by a bear, nobody who found your body would feel the need to confront the bear and hold it responsible. The bear would not need to be convicted in order to be acted against.
> being unable to take responsibility for them, from a human perspective, is the biggest separator between human and animal behaviour.
That is true, but also not related to what your GP was talking about IMHO.
I understood their comment as coming from a perspective of either "you should fear what you can't understand/explain - and you can't really understand animals" or "it's their nature to be violent, it doesn't matter whether you understand them", either of which I think is flawed.
You made a much better point.
I just have a habit of picking at reasoning even if I agree with the conclusion. Sometimes you end up with a more concise and to the point argument at the end of that, and in this case it came from you!
I wonder how much religion factors into the belief that humans are a fundamentally different category.
Abrahamic religions certanly rely on this idea. No idea about others.
I think it is more fundamental to human nature than can be explained by religion. Just hang around in tech circles and listen to them talk about other people and you'll see they consider themselves to be in some fundamentally different category from the rest of humanity.
You can call an animal "wild" without also condemning it to a cruel fate like the circus. It's not black and white.
I don't personally know what the solution is, but I'm sure there's a more elegant middle ground between "let it roam free among humans" and "cage and torture it until it dies."
In that video they show how far they still are from domesticated foxes compared to modern dogs. Well, domesticated pretty much means, "desirable traits for human benefit" when you think about it, the same applies to humans, but we call that civilized or sociable. Theres a joke in the comments, something like the fox goes "I'm okay with you being a meter away from me... but let's keep it that way." The dog, "you cant ignore my love!"
But I fully disagree on the assessment that larger dogs are more wild. Smaller dogs tend to be complete violent assholes for little to no reason. Larger dogs tend to need more reason to become aggressive, unless they came from an abusive environment. I volunteered at an animal shelter for about a year (admittedly to pick up women originally). But I gladly hung out with pits and shepherds from abused pasts so they can be rehabilitated for new homes. I could never do the same with anything smaller than a border collie. Just never worked out. Large working breed dogs are crazy easy for me to calm down, and I am generally not a brave man. Dogs have been bred the last 40k some odd years to genetically want to be with humans. Then some assholes the past few thousand years decided to breed for looks and tiny sizes instead of companionship. That's what makes the larger working dogs great. Listen to and love humans, and have a job to do is their breeding line. Not just looks, which can breed out the friendly part.
Caveat though, there are some pit lines that are a bit whack. Sadly, originally they were bred for fighting other dogs, but super strong friendliness for humans, to avoid the owner getting bit. Which is why they're cuddle bugs with people and are dicks to other dogs. This breed attracted a bunch of dipshits that bred them for just pure aggression, then add on the abuse. So yea... those are the sad cases.
A big reason that little dogs tends to be more violent is that they have to compensate their size by agression and appear larger than they are to fend off predators.
My bodeguero (spanish terrier) is the most cuddly animal I have ever met but he will 1v1 the sun if I let him.
My thing is, I've never been bit by a dog bigger than a border collie. I've been bit by chihuahuas, Scottish terriers and whatever those small scraggly white dogs are. I can never remember their names. And these were considered home ready dogs. I feel safer around an abused pitbull than by a "well behaved" chihuahua. I'm not being funny or macho about it. I'm dead serious. While an adult guy like me doesn't care about the little rat bite, that's going to traumatize a little kid away from liking dogs. Not to mention the breeding of extremely poor body traits that torture some of these dogs. They may look cute, but these poor things succumb to a wide range of abnormalities... I guess I'm just bias in general. That whole tea cup dog craze made me really polarized on the issue. I hate self interested, abusive breeders.
> While an adult guy like me doesn't care about the little rat bite, that's going to traumatize a little kid away from liking dogs.
Our neighbor has a "scraggly little white dog" as you describe.
It bit my (then three year old) daughter while she was riding her bike a year ago.
It certainly didn't do any favors for her trust of dogs.
Doesn't help that everyone and their mother seems to leave their dogs off leashes and then just say "oh don't worry, he's nice" as my kids are screaming their heads off while a creature roughly as big as they are sniffs and yips at them.
If nothing else, people tend to to put more effort into properly training large dogs out of any human-aggressive tendencies. It's a lot easier to view your Chihuahua nipping at someone's ankles as cute, compared to your pitbull doing the exact same thing.
Honestly, the biggest problem I've had with large dogs is poor socialization in how to play with humans. A dog doing properly-social play by dog standards (play-bows, carefully light nipping, etc) can still be a really worrying experience for an adult if the dog is 100lbs.
I'd say that foxes are well on their way to domestication.
I've been watching some SaveAFox videos on youtube, and their foxes display a whole range of social skills. Some like Finnegan love being handled, but others not as much.
Those specific breeds of foxes don't really make for indoor pets though, as they like to mark their territory.
I got a dog recently, and read lots of things online about 'crate training', and had lots of people advising me it was the way to go, so I got a 'crate' and tried it.
What a load of shit lol, it's a cage. They should call the process 'cage conditioning', the dog was fully aware he was locked in a cage and didn't like it.
Abandoned it very quickly, had a lot more success with just patience and positive reinforcement.
Half the people in jails in the USA haven't hurt anyone physically. We seem to lock people up just fine without any display of harm. We are a strange animal indeed.
> Though you could make a similar argument for domesticated animals like dogs. Especially larger dogs. Or humans! There are a lot of things that can be dangerous to humans, especially children, when they fly off the handle.
Dogs, regardless of size are safe to coexist with humans provided they are treated appropriately from a sustenance and behavior/training perspective. That's the result of traits associated with being an animal living in a pack social structure, along with thousands of years of breeding. When dog behavior crosses a line, the dog is euthanized.
> You wouldn't lock up a human either for having the capacity to harm someone else.
We do. When humans demonstrate a lack of control that puts others at risk, we apply progressive discipline to discourage future misbehavior. Fines, probation in various flavors, jail, and finally prison. If you steal a phone from an unlocked car, it's usually misdemeanor theft, if you break down my door to steal a phone, it's a felony burglary.
> So if you end up with an orphaned gorilla in your care, morally you are between a rock and a hard place.
It is really a ranking of priorities. I'm not an ethicist, but generally speaking, the preservation of human life is usually a primary moral imperative.
> Dogs, regardless of size are safe to coexist with humans provided they are treated appropriately from a sustenance and behavior/training perspective.
Debatable...
"In 1994, the most recent year for which published data are available, an estimated 4.7 million dog bites occurred in the United States, and approximately 799,700 persons required medical care (1). Of an estimated 333,700 patients treated for dog bites in emergency departments (EDs) in 1994 (2), approximately 6,000 (1.8%) were hospitalized (3)."
I think you are overdoing it, what OP clearly had in mind is that we all have the capacity for harm, yet not all humans are locked up simply because of this potential. I sure do have capacity to easily kill a fellow human in various ways, so does everybody I know and presumably so do you. There are multiple reasons why this capacity is never utilized, but that's another topic.
You are arguing few steps further about a person who realized this capacity and what society does to them.
> But locking up animals in cages - those who easily have the capacity to understand what you are doing to them - is cruel and immoral. So you either have to live with them or leave them be in their natural habitat.
I agree completely. I'll go as far as to say the idea of pets must perish.
You don't have to lock up a pet. Plenty of dogs lead happy contented lives, with family who take them for walks whenever asked, or even have free range of a generous rural territory.
This resonates with me. It deeply disturbs me that other animals still don’t have rights on parity with humans.
I can play devil’s advocate and make the ethical argument that animal lives have more intrinsic value than human lives. For one, they are innately innocent due to their (as we currently understand) more limited capacity for reasoning. This limited reasoning dismisses blame when they do things we see as wrong (similar to the way we do for children) and also limits their capacity to cause significant harm to the planet.
I will always side with other animals over man. If I could only rescue one organism from a burning building and had to choose between a human or another animal, I’d choose the other animal. If I had to choose which species becomes extinct tomorrow, it would be humans. We are a plague to this planet and solar system.
Selfish humans, obsessed with self preservation, will easily disagree with this judgement.
As an anti-speciesist vegetarian, I’d like to note that the above viewpoint probably sounds as extreme and incoherent to me as it does to most other people.
Parity as regards rights should be based on interests. There is nothing special about life itself. A mouse’s interests are not on par with the interests of a child, and saving the child would generally result in the least amount of suffering.
I did my best to take the parent comment seriously, but I really need to stress how ridiculous it is. Please don’t assume that that is a common viewpoint amongst vegan or vegetarians. It ultimately commits the same error: devaluing the life of an individual because it happens to belong to the “wrong” species.
I'm not a vegetarian or vegan, so I don't know why you're conflating my devil's advocate argument with those philosophies.
> A mouse’s interests are not on par with the interests of a child
For an anti-speciesist, this is a very anthropocentric and speciesist statement.
I would argue that saving the child would cause greater suffering[0], not only because the human condition unto itself is rife with suffering, but because we have the greatest capacity and demonstrated ability to cause grave harm to all species and to the planet, more so than any other living being.
The voluntary human extinction movement[1] is a very real movement, however ridiculous you find it to be.
I’m sorry. To clarify, the entirety of a mouse’s interests are less than the interests of a child. This includes external interests, like the interests of the parents, etc.
I agree regarding the generally higher capacity of healthy humans to experience tremendous suffering, and also the human ability to cause tremendous suffering. I do see a tension between those facts and my contention that saving a human results in less suffering. In my mind, human experience falls on a 3D plane, with positive/negative on the y-axis, severity on the x-axis and complexity on the z-axis.
The human ability to experience complex emotions like inspiration, jealousy, etc. make our interests slightly unique and weigh more as compared to most animals. Add on top of that the social aspect of interests (eg a parent has an interest in the well being of their child), and suddenly the value of human life can take on exponential degrees.
With that in mind, I think an individual should have the choice to end their life if society finds that the net suffering of their continued existence is greater than if they ceased to exist. To that end, human extinction is antithetical to my understanding because it implies forcing individuals to end their lives involuntarily. It’s the same with a pig. I wouldn’t eat a pig unless he somehow gained healthy adult-level sentience and told me he wanted me to eat him and that that would fulfill some deep desire of his. I know that example sounds absurd, but consequently, because no animal has a level of sentience complex enough to consent to being murdered, I refrain from eating any animals at all.
If you still want to engage, I have a question. I’m curious why, if you feel that humans are such a huge cause of suffering to, as you put it, innocent animals, you aren’t vegan or vegetarian?
Though you could make a similar argument for domesticated animals like dogs. Especially larger dogs. Or humans! There are a lot of things that can be dangerous to humans, especially children, when they fly off the handle.
There is always a risk. Most animals function emotionally like humans, but have no good way of communicating emotions like frustration and anger except through aggression.
But locking up animals in cages - those who easily have the capacity to understand what you are doing to them - is cruel and immoral. So you either have to live with them or leave them be in their natural habitat.
You wouldn't lock up a human either for having the capacity to harm someone else.
So if you end up with an orphaned gorilla in your care, morally you are between a rock and a hard place.