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…We’ve committed a multi-thousand year long genocide against dogs, breeding them for traits that we find useful, and usually killing the puppies that don’t possess useful traits…
So… We’ve treated them as equals for millennia? That tracks.
Awww, it can hardly breathe. Look how cute and helpless it is!
Maltese covered in tumors at 8 years old? That’s totally normal. Just like the cancer it inevitably will develop.
Meanwhile feral dog breeds can live up to 17 years just like wild wolves do. Though in the wild, the average lifespan is 5 years. Because of disease or injury.
I love my healthy mutt.
That’s not genocide, that’s eugenics. Just as bad.
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no that’s part of natural selection. it’s our biology telling us what we want. eugenics is systemic planned pairing and breeding. it’s also had the ideas that a person’s quality is defined at birth baked into it from the start. it’s based on the concept of a person’s worth being defined by the circumstances of their birth and not by their efforts in life.
also, actual science tells us that the best thing to “breed for”,if that’s the way you want to look at life, is genetic diversity. the healthiest stock has the most diverse gene pool. something every eugenicist also somehow manages to ignore that and deny that if improving or genetics is our goal we should be trying to all become a neutral brown and choose people the most different from us genetically.
cause that’s the thing about dog breeds. we can engineer the perfect biological hunting machine… that dies by age 11 at the latest. because breeding for a trait never creates healthy offspring. which makes sense, we weren’t breeding for health. the natural desire of most parents is a healthy child. it’s what nature optimized for. when we start looking for other traits we tend to fuck it up.
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the points i was making in the latter paragraphs is that even if there is nothing morally wrong and you’re not forcing anything it’s still an inherently flawed view of genetics. breeding the smartest, kindest and most capable people to have those traits you’ll still just end up with unhealthy offspring.
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ok, so what is your definition of eugenics?
because the dictionary definition is “the selection of desired inheritable traits to improve future generations”. that is what I’m saying is an inherently flawed ideology and practice. if you mean something different you might choose a different word.
Eugenics is not inherently bad, it’s just frequently used as an excuse to do really evil shit.
There’s personal and systemic eugenics. Systemic eugenics will always be bad.
Personal… Well, you’re not obligated to have children you don’t want either.
Eugenics is bad because it’s based on fundamentally incorrect ideas about how genetics plays into personal development. Galton drew specifically upon the fundamentally incorrect ideas of scientific racism, and wrote about Eugenics as being a means to better improve the superior races. Galton argued that things like poverty and mass suffering could have been solved this way, essentially arguing that it was the personal incompetence of the less fortunate which lead them into misfortune (also fundamentally incorrect).
Even if you drop the baggage of scientific racism, Eugenics is still conceptually ableist, choosing to eliminate those we deem disabled rather than finding solutions to better their lives.
On top of that, we were kind of hinging on sequencing the human genome giving us the insight to how genetic diseases work, the single possible case that eugenic thought might have had a use in. This has since fallen through. Further research into genetics has also demonstrated just how unreadable DNA is right now. We are still nowhere near being able to predict most genetic diseases based on the genetics of a couple.
I also cannot think of a single thing that eugenics implies should be done that isn’t absolutely evil. I’d argue that things that only encourage evil actions are themselves evil.
The concept of changing the species through genetic manipulation with intention as opposed to wild flailings of evolution (which is why I would consider to be eugenics) is not inherently evil, nor does it require anything horrible. As the poster above said, it is just often used as an excuse to do horrible things.
When we’re talking about this kind of genetic manipulation, there’s two methods. Being able to meaningfully read a person’s genetic code (we do not understand the majority of a person’s genetic code due to a variety of issues), or basing your actions on individuals.
The individuals version has already been done, where we barred certain ‘undesirable’ individuals from reproducing. We know this one to explicitly only leads to evil implementations. It turns the practice of finding a romantic partner into a game of fusing two people together to get a better one.
The other method currently has two tools currently: selective IVF and CRISPR. Both of these are in their infancy, with how effective they are still being up in the air. These techniques require highly specialized professionals and are thus expensive. These will likely always be expensive even after they get cheaper. The world we live in where the rich can have “super-babies” with no genetic defects, while most poor children are still born naturally, is one where discrimination based on genetics is treated as rational, and based on lineages. That is fundamentally the creation of an evil world.
We’re also still ignoring the fact that we’re still pretty explicitly ableist as a culture. How do you think it’ll feel when a person who lives with a disability gets pressured into IVF “so the child doesn’t end up like you”. Blind people have a subculture, deaf and mute people have a subculture, most people living with disabilities find each other for solidarity and relatability. We call it ‘living with disabilities’, but they just call it ‘living’. We’re still treating these issues as if they’re something to wipe out rather than changing our culture and infrastructure to accommodate them.
That last part may need a bit of citation, but yes modern breed standardization has unfortunately crippled many of the poor creatures from birth.
Adopt rescues, people! It’s usually super cheap and they’re almost always healthier dogs anyway.
I presume you meant to prepend these citations with your own summation, something along the lines of: “It’s a spectrum, not a point”, etc al?
This might be my favorite rage bait of all time. Lol
I mean, it’s also true, so is it really bait then?
Only in very broad strokes.
Yes
Its the cats that we don’t deserve.
They just happen, they adopt us, use us as slaves, indoctrinate us in a cat worshipping cult, …
I, for one, welcome our old feline overlords.
Yeah, I never ever complained myself, seems quite natural & logical tbh.
If you leave out the fact that we also breed them till their eyes pop out of their sockets, their brains don’t fit in their skulls, they are in constant fear of suffocating. Then yes
They’re either this or well built, intelligent, and filled anxiety over the impending collapse of the galaxy into a black hole. "What was that?! A small tear in the fabric of the space time continuum? Demons? Maybe the cat next door is finally going to murder all of us! Ok, probably not. But maybe I should bark at whatever it is just in case. "
Some of that is poor training, they bark at unknown things until you come, and then bark to back you up when you answer the door.
What you do it wait outside until they quiet down, then come in, or if you are answering the door move them away from the door before answering.
There’s probably somebody with better training methods.
those breeds are quite new, for the vast majority of our history dogs have been bred to be healthy, since they do important work and having them die on you is annoying after you put in all the work to train them.
Those “monsters” from the dark were the real heroes back when — braving the orange flickering light that instinctually meant death to sneak scraps from the stabby skin-wearers… Sounds like the original D&D story to me, NGL.
domesticating wolves by campfire with just body language would be a bad ass RPG VR game
Or from the wolf’s perspective as dlc: Domesticate the skin-walker
That’s what cats’ve done, TBF. They even taught themselves to sound like our babies! Not to mention, contracted a bio-parasite to further tilt our civilization to their whims…
Make it a Souls-like and prep millions worldwide for post-apoc success…
I mean, that’s what we want to believe, that it all started with someone feeding a hungry wolf, but knowing humanity it’s just as possible it started with a captured wolf and copious amounts of animal abuse.
It’s most likely that dogs/wolves just kept eating our waste, staying close to us, and after initial fights humans noticed the dogs/wolves are not being a threat, thus letting them do their thing and observing them.
Then humans eventually figured out that by observing dogs and their reactions, they could see if dogs smelled/heard something which they couldn’t. And then started to exploit that.
wolves just kept eating our waste
You may wanna edit this to say trash, it sounds like you’re saying wolves followed us around eating our shit, which afaik isn’t a theory for dog domestication.
Technically garbage rather than trash, if we’re being pedantic
I always thought us up here in America’s hat called it garbage, and those guys down in Canada’s shorts called it trash.
I’m 31 and just googled the difference. Ohh fiuuuuuuuuuuck!
That is mostly how it works now; words change meaning. Nobody I know says ‘trash can’, it’s ‘garbage can’. But yeah, they originally meant different things
I’ve begun to love finding out old meanings and origins to words, so this one kinda tickled me. I find it interesting too
afaik
Well… it actually is a theory. Like, all modern dogs love to eat human shit, so there’s been some evolutionary theories about how wolves/dogs of old have eaten human shit as an easy meal and thus part of their diets, and that might have aided in domestication and all that.
And now that I’ve already started to discuss dogs eating shit: My personal theory is, that rural dogs in India have human shit as a major source of their nutrition, since the sanitary conditions in many rural areas there are shitting in the bushes, and there’s a lot of village dogs…
Wow, this is the least fun group on the internet. These comments…
Yikes, you’re right. Should’ve skipped. Fuckin hell guys
The more I browse lemmy the more it feels true
This is fiercely wholesome
Cool nickname
I had to think of something, people kept making the same username joke at me.
“Monsters”
Nope
Did you know that wild wolves make sure the whole pact eats, but when you give dogs in a pen food, it’s every doggo for themselves, and the smallest ones can end up going without?
Ofc they’re still more sociable towards humans, but yeah, we just changed who their friends were and who they’re aggressive against. Gaslighted them into thinking we’re good for them.
We are talking from the perspective of a cave person.
really just anyone sitting in the wilderness seeing a creature of any kind at the edge of the light cast by a campfire, the creature could be a friendly sheep and i’d still shit myself into low earth orbit
*Alien ship arrives into orbit. It’s powerful energy weapons aimed at major population centers.*
Alien Ship: “Attention experiment 2648.996. It has been 50,000 orbits since your last status report. Name one good thing you have accomplished since we allowed you free reign over this planet.”
*Humans hold their beloved dogs as they look up in fear. Dogs lovingly lick their humans.*
Alien Ship: “Well done 2648.996. Well done.”
More like we were kind to the helpless pups that were left over after we slaughtered the adults. Unless we were hungry, of course.
It would be very difficult to keep that population stable, especially if one is starting from scratch and knows nothing about breeding dogs.
you think people ate wolves lol? yes that certainly sounds appealing and worthwhile.
i definitely wouldn’t prefer to trap a rabbit, nope.
People would not normally eat wolves. But in times of famine you can bet your ass they weren’t picky.
all you need to know is that dogs are fluffye! no need to look at the other comments :)!
I didn’t invent dogs. I don’t deserve dogs. :(
You are kenough.
Khanks
