Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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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 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.
Same question can be asked about humans. p-zombies and all that. Do other people really like you, or only pretend to like you to get on your good side (and eventually betray and hurt you, of course). It's a long stairway down to hell this way. I'd rather stay up here out of it, and pet the dog.
You need to do a bit of reading. Eating shit has very little to do with stupidity and lack of instincts and very much to do with nutrition. Of course, modern house dog rarely needs it as a proper owner already provides them necessary nutrients in much better form, but this is not depravity, and measuring different species by standards of modern Western hygiene is only a step away from "my dog/cat is a vegan" (those kinds of people need to be isolated on a barren island where there's nothing to eat but each other).
If you go for a ragebait, at least make it not an ignorant one maybe?
Dogs eating their own shit is not an evolved nutritional instinct, they aren't rabbits. Dogs will eat some quite nasty things because they think they taste good- used menstrual products, rotting meat, creepy crawlies, etc- but not poop. Poop eating is actually a den-cleaning behavior which can usually be prevented by providing a clean environment.
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I think the fact that you would consider P(other humans are p-zombies) even on the same order of magnitude as P(dogs are essentially p-zombies) is essentially the point I'm making.
I'm aware of animals that eat others' shit that has been through a different digestive tract and therefore has a different nutritional remnants, but please do enlighten me if the prevalence of eating one's own feces is more common than I thought.
Also, I see you left out the part about the vomit. Is there some nutritional value to that I'm also ignorant of?
Yes. First of all, a lot of what you call "vomit" isn't, it's regurgitation. That can happen when the dog expels food that hadn't reached the stomach yet. That can happen from time to time, though if it happens frequently there might be some problem with the plumbing somewhere on the way. But could be just biting more than they could chew, or stomach, quite literally. Obviously, there's no reason to waste good food just because it's slightly wet. Second, regurgitating is a frequent way for a parent to make food more easily palatable to children, and a dog may occasionally return to this childish behavior. Third, dogs have a chemical analyzer that most of us can't even dream of, and with that, if they see something that has viable nutrients mixed together with iffy substances, they could separate one from the other and eat the good parts without eating the bad ones. Just like eating carryon, for example. You probably would be revolted at the thought, but for many species - including dogs - it's a perfectly good meal, if you know what you're doing. There's also an instinctive behavior to clean up after themselves (to hide one's smell, for example, which both protects the dog and does not let the prey know the dog is near) and since the dog doesn't exactly have pockets... It could also be that a particular dog is unwell, of course, or is unable to realize eating something that smells good is not necessarily good for them - same as happens to many people too, just visit any local McDonalds store. Generally, if the dog vomits or regurgitates a lot, then that's the actual health problem. If it happens once in a while, usually not a big deal, and tells no more of their degeneracy than having an occasional quarter-pounder with cheese tells about human's.
Again, I must remind you that dogs are not humans, and what is disgusting and maybe harmful for you, is not necessarily so for a dog. If you started trying to lick your own butt as a means to maintain hygiene, your relatives probably would have you committed, but for a dog it is normal (and for many other animals too).
Coprophagia happens a lot in herbivores, because plants are tough to digest (I think you can continue this line of thought). Eating their own feces in dogs is actually not that common, but happens from time to time - though other species' feces are usually more appealing to them, for reasons you pointed out (though for a well-fed domestic dog there's no serious nutritional reason, but again the dog might not know that). One of the reasons puppies might do it is microbiome transfer (the gut has a lot of beneficial microbes, and guess what's the most efficient way for a mother to transfer some to the child). On the other hand, the pups may not have good hygiene habits yet, and in the absence of Pampers... But this is not that common in adult dogs actually. Of all dogs I knew well (about a dozen), none had any interest to their own poop. Research I saw shows only about 1/4 of dogs engage in this behavior, and it could be caused by various causes - from bad nutrition to bad training to psychological problems (anxiety->drive to hide->drive to remove one's smell->you can guess). But this specific thing is not universal for dogs at all.
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