The tl;dr is that dogs really do identify us as family, and in all likelihood, the first ancestral wolves to become domesticated dogs took as many co-evolutionary steps towards us as we did them.
Humans and dogs have been evolving alongside each other for at least 15,000 years. The sorts of dog breeds that can't survive in the wild (bulldogs, etc.) are a fairly recent innovation in all of that time, dating back to the mid 1800s and the emergence of the modern breeding program.
Dogs like being with us as much as we like having them around. They were the first domesticated species, and they are literally the only mammals we know of who can read human facial expressions and emotions as well as the great apes can. Our relationship with them is a partnership, not an enslavement.
If you want to take issue with the way humans treat animals, there are so many better targets for outrage than our treatment of the dog. Take the cow or the chicken, for instance, most of whom lead a tortured and awful existence and would want nothing to do with us in a state of nature.
Another example is Deer. I live in New Jersey and we have an overpopulation of Deer, to which the most common response is that we should cull them so they don't become dangerous to roads. The moral stance would be to design our transportation in a way that doesn't frequently kill other species. Another common response is that the overpopulation will lead to them dying anyway as their isn't enough food to sustain them, so the argument boils down to kill them because they're going to die anyway.
The Ainu people believe that their treatment of bears is just. I'm just pointing out that I'd rather see all of these animals free from human emotional projection.
There are too few wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, and bears to keep the population in check, so we do it.
>so the argument boils down to kill them because they're going to die anyway.
There's more to it than that. Overpopulation will cause damage to more than just deer. One of the biggest is the increase in the deer tick population and the subsequent increase in Lyme disease.
Instead of killing them ourselves, we could try to reintroduce predators, but why would a deer prefer being killed by a mountain lion to being killed by a human?
I'm ok with that but I think you'd find that an untenable policy for most Americans.
We have reintroduced wolves to national parks like Yellowstone, evidently with great success. I hope we do the same in other national parks if/where needed. Wolves do not prey on humans, contrary to popular belief, and generally keep a lot of distance from wandering hikers or campers.
Nature may not be "fair," but all things considered, I'd rather we let the wolves do the job of deer population control than humans. We are not as good at it, and we also pump the ecosystem full of heavy metals while we're shooting at the critters.
Wherever you see a forest where there is a deer problem, the trees you see today will not be replaced when they die.
Deer eat all the undergrowth and new saplings.
> I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer
Source: Thinking Like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold http://www.eco-action.org/dt/thinking.html
There are many problems with dog breeding though. The health and wellbeing of the animals do not seem to be prime motivations in at least some breeds.
But at least it contrasts with cows and chickens, which are domesticated and selectively bred as meat producing machines that survive just long enough for slaughter (for 99.99% of individuals of those species).
From the perspective of nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, humans create a huge number of niches which dozens (hundreds?) of species have evolved to fill. (And to be fair, eliminated a vast number of niches as well.) We've created niches like "human head and body hair", which lice exploit, "provide emotional support for humans", which dogs and cats fill, "carry heavy shit for humans", which horses, donkeys and oxen have filled (and still do, in some places), and "produce huge numbers of delicious offspring, most of whom humans will eat", which pigs and chickens and cows fill.
From nature's perspective, these niches are no more strange or unnatural than the bacteria which live in guts to break down plant matter for their hosts, the birds that pick insects off of large animals, coral reefs or the ants that farm aphids. Even meat animals aren't really a significant aberration: countless species produce huge amounts of young, from dozens to millions at a time, with only one or two of those offspring surviving to reproduce themselves ("r selection").
Nature is all about the survival of the genes most fit for the existing niches. It doesn't care about what niches existed in the past or might exist in the future, and it doesn't share your biases. As far as nature is concerned, cows and dogs are more fit than buffalo and wolves, because cows and dogs are better-adapted to the existing niches.
You can choose to believe otherwise, that wolves are inherently superior to dogs and buffalo to cows, but that's your judgement, not nature's.
In fact it can explain why I have empathy with other living things, and want them to have happy lives. Maybe that will be an expanding niche, who knows. I know nature doesn't care, but I do.
If, as you rightly claim, everything is just interacting fields, should it make or break the argument if the specific interaction of particular (as yet unknown) combinations of fields is as yet unknown?
It can also be questioned if an individual's thoughts are special enough in the grandest scheme of things - or if they're merely a mechanism, that seems special to the body where those thoughts are occurring. For example, moving away from humans: animals have thoughts too, yet their behavior(s) can be abstracted into proper theories (apex predator theory, food chains, etc.) backed with sufficient evidence, without much regard to the thoughts of individual creatures, or even entire species - classifying creatures as predator vs prey is sufficient to study a lot of large scale ecological phenomena.
Of course, there can be various kinds of explanations for why one feels empathy for others - evolution: humans evolved to live in groups and empathy was an asset to group-living, incentives/economic: those that show consideration for others were similarly reciprocated, etc. etc.
PS: I wrote the parent, different alias.
PPS: the dog breeding problems are very real, and I do hope a rich dog-loving American can hire veterinarians and lawyers to simply sue some of the organizations involved in setting/promoting the ludicrous breed standards (resulting in GSDs with sloping backs, pugs that can't even breed without human assistance, etc.). The difference with cows and chickens is one can find enough dog lovers to make an actual issue out of this, compared to (live) cow lovers or (live) chicken lovers.
Does that book talk about the phenomenon of baboons stealing puppies from wild dogs and raising them?
Every time we look at it we end up pushing back the date of human canine cohabitation. If it turns out that this coevolution with dogs predates hominids, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.
The dog was, in all likelihood, domesticated multiple times over multiple thousands of years in various parts of the globe. The lineage that survived to present is likely to have come from the Fertile Crescent area, even though its domestication predates the agricultural revolution. (Dogs joined us when we were hunter-gatherers, and cats joined us when we settled down to store grain and thereby attracted rodents).
I am not convinced that non-human apes "domesticated" the dog the same way we did, even if modern apes seem capable of taking actions superficially analogous to domestication. Ancestral wolves specifically followed human camps around and lived among us for (presumably) thousands of years before it even occurred to us to domesticate them as such. By that time, nature had 'pre-selected' them for us -- the friendly and cooperative ones, who could survive at the margins of our hunting parties, outcompeted their more feral cousins, who kept their distance from humans and then starved when the mammoths ran out. The first ancient wolves we came into frequent, nonviolent contact with were, in all likelihood, the result of many generations of natural selection before we set about artificially selecting them.
Ironically, and counterntuitively, dogs were more naturally fit than wolves to survive in the early days of the Homo sapiens.
Dogs can't live in nature? I think that needs a citation. Or at least we need some kind of explanation for the apparently impossible phenomenon of stray and feral dogs.
Dogs with extremely flat faces (think pugs)? They have a lot of trouble breathing. Also, their eye sockets are shallow and so their eyes will pop out of the socket sometimes. There's a litany of health issues related to chasing the breed standard for dogs, sometimes related to how the standard has been taken to an extreme that deform the dog and sometimes related to the massive inbreeding that's happened as a result of chasing the breed standard.
There are certainly some dogs that can live in the wild, and there are certainly some breeders who try hard to be responsible about how they breed for the standard and how they breed their lines together, but the average purebred dog is not one you can just drop in the woods and it'll go find its own food and survive.
He fiercely guards food and will snap at anyone that reaches for him. He hunts insects including flies and cockroaches (he caught at least a few of those on our walks).
I don’t think he’d be as effective as a rat terrier, but I suspect he could hunt and kill field mice and maybe small rats.
There are ways to be responsible about pet ownership for animals like dogs and cats. It doesn't need to be this horrific experience you've painted it as.
People mostly treat their dogs in a straightforward way.
This bear stuff would be just fine too if they didn't torture it to death at the end.
This is false. The accepted mechanism is that wolves self-domesticated, and that humans and dogs co-evolved.
You have also misused the word 'children'.
Now puppy mills and the like are not good, but the very concept of dog ownership is wholesome.
This is how I feel about dog ownership. We take children from their species, sterilize them, and gaslight them into thinking they're part of our family instead. The only reason dogs are domesticated is because we've been inbreeding their species for thousands of years and they literally can no longer live in nature because of how we've bred them. If anything, raising, hunting, and killing an animal is more natural than what we do.