If people separate themselves from nature and do not have personal friendship and daily interaction with animals, I think it is more difficult to care about them generally, based on the social rule of "statistical numbing" where studies have shown that we care more about individual creatures that we know something about than groups that we don't (1,2).

(1) https://bigthink.com/risk-reason-and-reality/statistical-num...

(2) https://www.ibtimes.com/why-we-care-more-about-death-lion-th...

This is a fake argument. Owners of carnivores happily feed meat of numerous chicken, pigs and cows to their pets. Keepers of free-roaming cats accept that each of those kills 100 birds and rodents per year.

But then the better solution is to have the people interact with useful animals, like service animals or agricultural animals. Pets would be superfluous when there are other animals that could provide interactions and another useful purpose. This would be a more efficient use of resources and more climate friendly.

I'm not sure how you got this conclusion, it seems like the exact opposite of what they're saying.

Placing animals in buckets of "useful" and "useless" is not empathy; that's back to the point of treating them like tools or exploitable resources.

Love and empathy is not intended to be conditional on what value you can reap from it. At best that's a business relationship, and at worst it's something very dark.

"...treating them like tools or exploitable resources."

Everything is a resource regardless of whether it is exploited. The person saying empathy comes from having exposure to pets is in essence saying pets are a resource to cultivate empathy and should be exploited as such. The issue is resource constraints. Pets consume a lot of argicultural and pharmaceutical resources.

You talk of love and empathy being unconditional, but when you live in a resource constrained world, should we spend money creating, housing, and feeding pets? Or should we care for the vulnerable humans? Should we stop keeping pets so that we don't need the agriculture that is required to support them, thus feeding people or allowing the land to return to the natural world and it's native animals?

Resources are a part of the equation. It seems many people ignore the n-order impacts. It's the same as people buying their processed food or meat without ever seeing the source and process. Probably even more so with kibble since it doesn't look like food to us.

Utilizing a relationship with a pet to cultivate empathy is a form of exploitation in the same way that being kind and generous to people in order to feel good about oneself is a form of selfishness. The Dalai Lama refers to this as "wise selfishness."

As long as the animal is also happy and cared for, then utilizing a relationship with a pet to cultivate empathy is a healthy, normal, pro-social behavior which makes the world a better place. You could say it's a symbiotic relationship of wise exploitation.

(EDIT: To clarify, the difference here is that challenges which arise in such relationships serve to grow and enhance empathy and love. Whereas with a work animal / tool, challenges in the relationship means discarding the beast and replacing it with something more useful)

As far as the hypothetical situations go, it's a red herring that I don't have the time to dive into.

You are ignoring the n-order impacts like resource allocation. You are clearly not generating empathy for the animals that your pet is consuming. It also seems any positive impact is negligible give the current status quo.

"As long as the animal is also happy and cared for, then utilizing a relationship with a pet to cultivate empathy is a healthy, normal, pro-social behavior which makes the world a better place." emphasis mine

This is a highly speculative opinion that provides no cost benefit analysis.

Yet practically all pet owners use and exploit their pets emotionally. The term "pet loves you unconditionally" used as an argument for pets is revealing: They are mostly kept to give the owner a feeling of being loved, which is much harder to get from other human beings. Ideally suited for increasingly narcissist population. Second, they are used to virtue signal, to increase social capital. The saying goes, if you cared for pets, you would be a good person, and in reverse, if you did not like pets, you would be a bad person. This is obviously wholly unsubstantiated, and there are numerous counterexamples. This is true even more for "rescues", which makes the owners feel like saviors. And as usual, because many people have incorporated the meme of pet ownership so deeply into their identity, they cannot argue about this rationally.

Adopt stray animals, dont buy.

And do not show them off, in order not to entice others to buy.

Unpopular opinion, but I would completely outlaw any pet ownership or animal husbandry on the simple basis that it's impossible for animals to consent to being owned.

What do you think about cooperative hunting between humans and dogs? Not the same as modern domestication, but some have theorized dogs may have domesticated themselves by eating scraps and/or leaving scraps progressing into sharing, hunting and training with humans. These relationships could have slowly progressed to human ownership of dogs. If we gloss over the hunting ethics, where would you draw the line for when this ethical cooperation between unequal partners turns unethical? Or do you reject the premise?

They didn't consent to nature either.

And that's why we don't use "but Nature did it first" as a justification in moral discussions.

I think that's too simplistic.

Here's an animal. The options are: - Owned/managed by a human - Living in nature - Not existing

The animal has consented to exactly none of those. But living in nature is not a bed of roses. Is it moral to subject an animal to that?

In that analysis, human ownership (if humane) seems like the most moral option. And "nature did it first" has nothing to do with the analysis.

I disagree it's too simplistic. It's a logical fallacy that we wouldn't be advocating for in any other context than our treatment of non-human animals.

It's also just a disingenuous argument. If our actual concern were the welfare and lives of animals in the wild, we would be capturing and caring for those individuals - not breeding new ones into existence.

Even humane ownership generally implies reproductive restrictions. I don't see how that could be considered the most moral option.

Neither did a child being born

Nor do any of us have the real option to consent or withdraw consent to living in the society we are born into (assuming emmigration is not an option, or that the alternatives are no better)