I'm on this boat as well.

Keeping other life captive for your own sporadic amusement is pathologically self-centered.

Adopting injured animals sometimes leaves them dependent. We have an aviary of deceive pigeons. They each have a different issue. Is letting them die kinder?

I’d say that it is sometimes, but it gets complicated fast.

Some animals-turned-pets developed symbiotically with humans, and continued through selective breeding (inevitably, and with mixed virtue).

The classic example is wild dogs to work dogs to pet dogs. I think this is healthy and remains symbiotic.

And the classic example of excess is all the sad breeds developed by bad people, to accentuate some aesthetic values with inadequate regard for the (sometimes life-long) pain and discomfort caused by side effects of the genetic selection.

Agreed on birds though. They are pretty and entertaining, but how can it not be cruel to cage a bird?

Do all those African Grays who amuse and seem to enjoy their humans really just suffer from Stockholm Syndrome?

I don't know, but I don't trust that the humans have thought about it in a non self-serving way.

The initial existence of pet and worker breeds may be symbiotic and natural, but the way people treat them like a slave species and perpetuate them is arbitrarily done for the convenience of humans.

I can’t stand when I see “my fur baby is lost!” when describing the escape of large adult social dog. No, that dog knows how to get home. It escaped its prison.

> I can’t stand when I see “my fur baby is lost!” when describing the escape of large adult social dog. No, that dog knows how to get home. It escaped its prison.

That dog may know how to get home initially and enjoys the freedom having slipped the leash and exploring. But there's no guarantee that when the dog decides it would like to get home that it can, nor is it making an informed decision about the risks that it faces.

I get where you're coming from in the extreme, but animals do get lost or into situations they can't get out of. We took in two stray kittens as outdoor cats and we'd occasionally have to go around the neighborhood to find them because they'd be behind a wall in someone else's yard and forget how to make it back.

As soon as they saw our faces over the wall they'd follow us to an opening or the gate and then find their way home.

Ultimately, one of them met an untimely end from some stray dogs. But that's life.

Say that to dogs, who have co-evolved with humans over thousands of years to a level that not only do they look completely different from wolves, but they can happily digest food that a wolf would starve on.

Dogs like to be with people. Even free-roaming street dogs will usually live in close proximity to people. A well-cared for household dog or cat is one of the most happy, pampered beings who ever lived, often cared for at a level akin to human children.

Absolutist anti-pet thinking is how PETA ends up euthanizing 97% of the pets it receives at its shelter.

My conviction comes from having owned a dog, and realizing after a couple of years that it will never have the life in a pack roaming the lands that it obviously craved (“obvious” after observing its behavior for long enough). I don’t think a healthy co-evolution can be claimed when the animal is not free to act independently, i.e. without being coerced (like being taken on a leash or otherwise physically constrained). I’m more sympathetic to cats as pets, if they can come and go as they please.

Your conclusion may have been correct about your dog, but extending that to all dogs is pretty large and ridiculous leap. Dogs view their people as family members (which is what a pack is), and many other people’s dogs get to have a healthy group of dog friends as well. You sound like a person who just failed to keep a happy dog and developed a rationalization that all dog ownership is morally wrong.

Dog domestication is generally thought to be an example of commensalism, and potentially mutualism. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fvets.2021.6623... In other words, it only happened in the first place because a group of wolves benefited from association with people. Pleistocene hunter-gatherers did not have the physical ability to force a grown wolf to be captive if it did not want to be.

A dog that requires a leash or an active restraint to prevent it from running away is not representative of dog ownership in general. My dog has no interest in running away and the only time I have to use a leash is when it’s imposed by local ordinance.

If your dog wanted to run away it probably had a shitty life.

Different breeds, and different dogs within those breeds, have different drives.

I know some dogs that will gleefully run away and explore the woods if given the chance... and then return sheepishly 20-30 minutes later. If they ever do get lost, or someone else "finds" them, etc, it'll be a tragedy.

My nextdoor feed is filled with run away dogs. I think your experience might be slightly less common than you think.

Survivor bias. Your nextdoor feed doesn’t have posts about the orders of magnitude more dogs that aren’t running away.

For those as confused as I was, Nextdoor: some sort of social thing.

Not a feedlot nextdoor to OP.

It really seems like a trade off. Animals seem “happy” and “free” out in nature, but are they?

They have to be on guard every single second because something might eat them. If they get injured, that is an absolute death sentence. There is no safety net. They have to weather harsh weather conditions. They are at risk for being eaten alive and enduring a slow agonizing painful death by other animals that do not care one iota about their well-being

At least in captivity they are safe. I don’t see how we as humans are all that different in how most of us choose to live our lives

This is true, but an important question is also: does an animal in captivity have the ability to express its fundamental emotional/behavioral drives?

Temple Grandin’s book “Animals in Translation“ is the textbook here, and the short answer is that many species are totally incapable of normal, necessary behavioral expression when held captive. Many animals kept in captivity subsequently develop what are called “stereotypies”, which is a nicer sounding word for mental illness disorders. Parrots very often have this. There are good reasons why parrots are relatively uncommon pets. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14529811/

This is a fundamentally misguided take.

An equivalent comparison would be jailing all humans to keep them safe from each other. Humans having a home for occasional safety from environmental hazards is not the same as free-flying birds being caged in isolation forever.

Maybe we should ask the pets about that, instead drawing random lines in the sand that feel just like parroted BS

Do chicken feel that being the most successful bird in the planet is unfair?