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Controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker allegedly uses a shock collar on his dog on stream.
It is narrative shorthand for a villain - to emphasize his wickedness and complete removal from the family of man - to kick a dog for no reason other than vicious spite. While on air last night, expounding upon his hatred of America and its violence and imperialism, his dog Kaya stands up behind him. A Tibetan mastiff/guardhound mix, the streamer purchased her a long time ago as a puppy. Nowadays, she spends the majority of her waking existence sitting behind him, in camera as a prop during his streams. As soon as he sees that she's moving off the bed, he shouts at her, and reaches for something off-camera. Immediately afterwards, the dog yelps as she tries to lay back down.
It is obviously a shock collar that is being used. No amount of denial or snarky comments can get anyone to believe that their lying eyes can see any differently. And if you think that's an overstatement - I invite you to see the footage for yourself. The fact that the man still has a career after saying "America deserved 9/11" is testament to the country's tolerance for extreme left-wing radicalization, but this might very well be the thing that can take him down. Americans love their dogs: creatures of innocent, adoring love for man. The fact that Hasan uses his dog to sustain his flagging social media presence - in emotes and in donation messages - is a transparent attempt to associate his vile personality with an animal's emotional resonance.
You can tell a lot about a character of a man by his treatment of creatures who depend entirely upon his good will and care for their lives. By this metric, Hasan is a despotic and evil blackguard. One hopes that these clips are shown at tonight's congressional hearing to the Twitch CEO. At the very least, it will be entertaining to see how the man deflects for his pet demagogue. Perhaps, in a peace offering, he can offer to collar the streamer?
There is nothing wrong with using a shock collar. View the dog as a working animal, its job is essentially to perform as an actor contributing to his streams. In exchange it receives food, shelter and so forth. It seems like a fair deal for the dog, I see nothing wrong with this.
Pet owners online are some of the most deranged, toxic people I have ever encountered. They seem to view dogs and cats as our masters, that we must deliver them lavish accommodations and expect nothing in return. Suffice it to say I find this unreasonable. If a human is expected to have a job, so too can a dog.
Shock collars can be a useful training tool in extreme cases when normal tools are ineffective. But they have to be used in close temporal proximity to the bad behavior and coupled with other methods of training and positive reinforcement. The goal is always to move away from a shock collar as soon as possible.
What happened in the video was pretty much the opposite of effective use of a shock collar. He administers the shock for a fairly minor and random bit of animal behavior that isn’t putting the dog or person at risk, he administers the shock too late, it is not accompanied by clear warning or commands. From the dog’s perspective, this is just pain being inflicted at random. It is not meaningful cruelty, but meaningless. Piker gets angry and hurts the dog.
So at worst he is guilty of using a less-than-optimal training technique. I view it as identical to spanking children. Perhaps there is a more optimal way of training a child, but people are under no moral obligation to be maximally optimal in everything they do. Obviously physically disciplining a child could be taken to the point of abuse, but a spanking is not in-and-of-itself abusive and does not require being the most optimal method
No, he's guilty of pointless cruelty directed at an animal that did nothing wrong. It's flatly evil.
The discipline of children is an excellent comparison. There's nothing wrong with the training tool in and of itself, but inflicted on a child for no real reason with no reasonable end goal, it's simply abuse. A man shocking a dog or hitting a child for not instantly complying with his pointless whims is a sinister individual.
The animal did something wrong though, it strayed from the desired position necessary for the stream. I don’t see why “actor” is a less valid vocation for a dog than any of the other myriad tasks we have forced them to do through the years. Being forced to stay in a given location for a stream seems quite similar to dogs assigned to guard a certain area, which are often chained for the purpose, and this seems like a much more luxurious assignment than a junkyard.
I actually think this is significantly more humane. I am not very bothered by dogs being confined to a given area, but not even being able to shift around if sore, bored, or simply wanting a change is fucked up.
We turn hospital patients who can't move because they get bed sores, etc. A chained up dog can still get up, stretch its legs and move a bit, and settle into a new, more comfortable posture or location.
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Given the amount of time he has had this dog, and the delay in his response, the dog has no real understanding that it has a job or occupation, unlike properly trained occupational dogs, which, it is important to note, we fail out most potential candidates for even to this day. That means, most dogs are not capable of being occupational dogs, unless the occupation is something like ratting or foxhunting for the appropriate breeds. Sitting still for a several hour podcast is not an occupation any dog breed has been bred for.
There is no real defense of this video I saw other than dogs having zero moral valence or some bizarre long running joke on this program that needs to be explained.
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It is legitimately impossible for me to believe that this is a sincerely held belief. The dog has no capacity to understand the role of an "actor", this is merely being subject to pointless misery for its entire life. It really seems like you're just trying too hard to lean into how lame it is that people care about dogs.
You think the dogs running on treadmills to turn spits in Victorian England “understood” how their motive power was being transferred through cogs and widgets to procure a homogeneous meat temperature so the Earl of Chelmsford could entertain his dinner guests with delicious roast? Come on, requiring that a dog understand its role in order for its work to be morally permissable is ludicrous.
I think most dogs that are bred to run believe that their role is to run and basically enjoy the activity. I'm sure many dogs were subject to abject cruelty in prior eras for reasons that I would personally find abhorrent and I don't think this is much of a defense of Piker. If the absolute best someone can say is that people were also cruel to dogs in the past, this does not move me one iota from the position that this is degenerate, third-world behavior unbecoming of a decent modern dog owner.
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I dont know this specific story, but dogs, as part of their nature, love running. If their running was naturally transformed into human worth they dont give a crap.
Dogs dont naturally love being shocked.
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I'm not going to write paens to Hassan's treatment of his dog. But its littermates are probably underfed in a junkyard.
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Of course the dog has no understanding of acting, but that’s irrelevant. The misery is not pointless, presumably it increases the entertainment of his stream (I have no idea, I’m just assuming this is his motivation). The dog is presumably disinclined to sit still for hours at a time, but so what? I’m disinclined to sit at my computer coding for hours but tough shit, that’s what my employer wants. A blind guide dog accompanying a student to class has to sit still for the duration of the class, tough shit. Dogs having jobs is perfectly normal and in the grand scheme of things neither this job nor his training method seem inordinately cruel. Historically perhaps a dog might be gored by a boar while forced to participate in hunts.
That's kind of the point, though. Dogs weren't forced to participate in hunts. They do it themselves, they love it. Depending on the breed, they were bred to do it almost compulsively. Stopping a dog chasing things is hard, that's why you have to keep them on a leash in the park.
Whereas any dog breeds that are not lapdogs have immense difficulty staying still. According to https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/mastiff/ a mastiff has middling energy levels i.e. is not a lap dog, and almost certainly finds it very difficult to stay still for lengthy periods.
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