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Notes -
What kinds of pets do you all have? And why are dogs the best?
Dog culture is just a unique form of brood parasitism. They are like any other superstimulus. What porn is for sex, what streamers are for friendship, what dramas are for romance, etc. That is what dogs are for raising children. They grab the relevant hardwired reward systems without any of the messy complications of dealing with actual people who can have their own lives and develop their own agency. Nothing more than a low-stakes, ersatz sense of fulfillment.
Objectively, I can't feel much more than disgust for dog culture when I see the shit and piss covering my city, the daily cacophony of barking, the glimmer of slobber residue lining products in grocery stores, the stories of bites and maulings. Dog ownership is easily one of the highest negative externality hobbies that society just accepts without question (see even this thread: "And why are dogs the best?" "Literally nobody can raise an ethical objection to giving dogs healthier, longer lives, right?"). I would put so much money on the table to live in a city that completely bans dogs and actually enforces it.
More importantly, dogs have evolved their behaviors and appearances to most effectively hijack our instincts. You look at a golden retriever and it looks like it's smiling. It hops around and wags its tail and it looks like it's happy. But is any of that actually a reflection of its internal mental state or are these just behaviors we subconsciously selected for because it's pleasant to for us. Do they play with us because they enjoy it or because we programmed them to obsessively need it? Maybe it's both, but if they were actually miserable on the inside there's no way for us to know.
To me it seems akin to a putting a smiling face on a robot. We are just more susceptible to projecting human assumptions onto dogs because on some level we know that we made robots, but we rarely think about what we've done to dogs. They seem constantly anxious and bored, because we wanted them to always be willing and able to play whenever we feel like it. We've stripped away so much of their basic instincts they don't even realize it's not the best idea to eat their own shit or lap up their own vomit. In some cases we've actively bred for deformities because some of us find them "cute."
They are craven, pathetic creatures that only exist to feed into our narcissism. It would be hard to convince me that the world wouldn't be better if dogs never existed. For us, and maybe even for them.
Shades of this classic essay: https://mattlakeman.org/2020/03/21/against-dog-ownership/
I think dogs if you have a sizable piece of land (or even big yard) are totally fine. Or if you already have kids. I absolutely have some internal judgement towards any couple I see that has a dog and no kids (probably should go to confession)
I'm certainly not the first or only one to come to these conclusions. I genuinely believe dogs have some sort of mind virus effect. They've found an exploit in our circuitry that blinds many to the obvious. People are defensive of their dogs right to slobber on you with a ferocity I haven't even seen for children.
I do wonder if pet culture has an appreciable suppressive effect on fertility rates the way that porn addiction can cause withdrawal from attempting real-world relationships.
There's some evidence that pet ownership makes childbearing more likely.
Anecdotally, I've observed similar among friends in the US, but I think for them it had more to do with a confounding desire to nurture that made them more likely both to want pets and to want children. Pets being relatively low-stakes makes it more sensible to try them first before children.
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