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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 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 because we bred them to crave human attention the way an addict craves heroin there's no way for us to know.
To me it seems akin to a putting a smiling face on a robot or setting ChatGPT to max sycophancy. We are just more susceptible to projecting human assumptions onto dogs because on some level we know that we made robots and LLMs, 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 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.
This is a very impoverished way of seeing the world. You could use the same reductionist logic to say that love is nothing but chemicals firing in the brain, or that morality is nothing but dressing on cold, utilitarian game theoretical outcomes to push cooperation.
It's one way of looking at life, that has perhaps some truth to it, but is ultimately deeply flawed.
This is orthogonal to my point. I'm basically talking about p-zombies. My disagreement is not about the value of love, morality, loyalty, etc. I just take issue with dog owners who insist that these are qualities that one can find in dogs. I consider humans to have all been produced in a similar enough mold to go about my life assuming that they aren't all p-zombies. Dogs come from a very different path. One that I interpret as producing something closer to a p-zombie. I believe Jane Doe when she says she loves to ski. I have doubts Fido loves playing fetch any more than Claude loves to code.
If you were to suddenly go comatose with only your dog around, how long do you think before it starts eating your face and gnawing on your ribs? Is that what you call love and loyalty?
Various very unfortunate experiments show to us humans frequently resort to cannibalism once starved enough. Including consuming their own offspring, for example. As I said, if you step on this stairway and walk on it consistently, with open eyes and cold logic, it won't lead you to a happy place.
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For a bonded dog? Your corpse would stink and the city would show up before it started to eat you. They’ll eat feces first.
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