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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.
We did this with women too. We deserve women. /s
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.
Eugenics is not inherently bad, it’s just frequently used as an excuse to do really evil shit.
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.
Sorry to disappoint you, but even just picking your partner off of looks is literally a form of eugenics if you preach being attracted to your partner… Parents who decide to abort a fetus with a terminal illness is ALSO literally and directly eugenics.
Eugenics itself isn’t bad, it’s just certain morons think THEY deserve to decide such things for and about others.
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.
Nothing I said was incorrect. Eugenics IS NOT ONLY Nazi-style eugenics. Period. Ever.
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.
I do not defend the practice of attempting to pick “good” genes, but to point out eugenics is very much around and accepted by everyone. It’s just a question to what degree, and certain people want to extend their decisions on the matter to others.
OFC you cannot simply pick pretty babies and end up with a “better” species. That is an ignorant, stupid, and Nazi-esque way to look at eugenics.
Stop letting Nazis and other similarly ignorant fucking morons define the world.
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.
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, …
Cats are ancient aliens. That’s why Egyptians worshipped them, that’s why their pee glows and why their scratches and bites are so toxic. They’re not of this earth. Don’t trust them! They’re trying to take over and they’re being allowed to win!!
If wishing for an alien feline overlord is wrong, I don’t want to be right!
Sign me up for a human cat hybrid wifu
Oh noooo, it’s too late!!
Kzinti spies!
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…
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
But then what about, say, cows? They were domesticated too, but to the extent that they subjectively like and trust humans (and I’ve seen very friendly cows) they have been deceived, with very few exceptions. Maybe we deserve them in the purely material sense since they are the products of our labor, but they don’t deserve us…
Perhaps not individually - although even there, what is the average lifespan of a cow in the wild? - but collectively there have been far more cow offspring than there would have been if they had not been domesticated.
Also, looking at every other wild species that we’ve eradicated, they seem to have decided to get in on our good side, which since they aren’t extinct may have worked out well for them.
And even individually, if they live >3x longer, in a more comfortable environment where food is provided routinely… it’s arguably not as bad a trade-off as it first appears.
A lifetime of slavery ending in death, or try to outcompete the species that invented guns? We might each make a different choice, but they made theirs.
I have heard that argument for animal husbandry, but in today’s world the comfortable environment is provided to only a tiny fraction of livestock. If I had the choice to either be a random pig or chicken nowadays, or just nothingness, I rather not exist at all. What’s the point of living 3 times longer when you hardly have enough space to even turn around and stand in your own shit? If anything, the longer life span makes it worse.
Cow: I want my species to thrive in number!
monkey’s paw finger curls
Damn… good point.
I was even all set to argue back with like: each individual cow makes their own choice, as in the ones who fight back against the system get killed, whereas those who simply accept it as-is continue to exist, leading us to today where those who are left are those who are genetically predisposed to not fight (but theoretically, they could still fight back?). And that even before we delved into direct genetic manipulation, to increase the meat-to-effort ratio. Maybe one day we’ll design cows that just walk directly into our mouths and beg us to chew them?
So humans in essence foundationally altered what a “cow” even is - like imagine a wild boar that humans actually feared, vs. today’s mere “pigs”. What is left is a shadow of the former glory that the true bovine herbivore ruminant was in its prime heyday. i.e. nobody alive to today has ever seen a true “cow” (unless like boars there is some wild variant somewhere, not descendants of some escapee but a truly untouched species?).
That’s all on us. As people elsewhere are saying, we treat cows almost as bad as we treat humans beings.
Perhaps that is why shows like The Matrix are so horrifying - it’s what we would do (/ are already doing), if the situation were reversed.
Hey, it’s great you contemplated my point this much, I do not expect this when arguing online :) While I would prefer there to be less animal suffering, I don’t think demand for meat is going away anytime soon, but I think it is realistic for lab grown meat to replace actually raising the entire cow in the not too distant future, making this discussion finally obsolete. In the sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy there are actually some form of livestock that actively want to be eaten and even recommend which parts of them are most delicious. The Matrix comparison is great as well, I did not think of that yet.
Lab grown meat will replace the NEED for cows, but I dunno if it will replace the DESIRE for them to be slaughtered:-(.
This is fiercely wholesome
Cool nickname
I had to think of something, people kept making the same username joke at me.
*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.”
all you need to know is that dogs are fluffye! no need to look at the other comments :)!
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.
I didn’t invent dogs. I don’t deserve dogs. :(
You are kenough.
“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
