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-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
-"Don't mind Frazzled. He's just Dakka's crazy old dude locked in the attic. He's harmless. Mostly."
-TBone the Magnificent 1999-2014, Long Live the King!
Talizvar wrote: There can be peace as long as the dog knows his place... grasshopper.
But yeah, if animals in general were "human" I would have been jailed so many times for involuntary "manslaughter" running over stray "humans" with my truck at night on country roads.
These accidents have gained the approval of my "overlords":
Phineas (the InPhinerator, or "Meow-ic") and Ferb (the Ferbinator or "Squeak").
I am outnumbered and have no choice but to take their side along with the steadily diminishing guppies.
If animals in general were considered equal citizens, frankly, humans would not be the ones deciding the outcome of any sort of election.
Because as equal citizens, adult animals would have the right to vote, too.
And they outnumber us. By a lot.
Animals aren't just things like cats and dogs. Spiders are animals too. So are ants. So are mosquitoes. Literally all insects are animals, in fact.
The reality is that if you are an organic life form on Earth, you have 3 or 4 options for what you are: animal, plant, fungus, and maybe virus if we can figure out whether they're alive or not.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/23 02:20:55
Pouncey wrote: If animals in general were considered equal citizens, frankly, humans would not be the ones deciding the outcome of any sort of election.
Insects take control you say?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/23 03:24:01
The Laws of Thermodynamics:
1) You cannot win. 2) You cannot break even. 3) You cannot stop playing the game.
Colonel Flagg wrote:You think you're real smart. But you're not smart; you're dumb. Very dumb. But you've met your match in me.
Pouncey wrote: If animals in general were considered equal citizens, frankly, humans would not be the ones deciding the outcome of any sort of election.
Insects take control you say?
Yes.
However, there are difficulties.
No animal has a concept of how elections work in human societies. They are entirely unaware of how our system works, because effectively human laws are things that only exist in the minds of humans. We write things down, yes, but our writing and language are entirely arbitrary in terms of what symbols and sounds mean what, so there is no way for these animals to ever have understood anything we have ever said or written in any human language. Our languages are actually the most complex communication system on Earth, and in fact just being able to speak required our larynx to grow to the point we are the only animals who cannot both breathe and swallow at the same time.
So, naturally, it would be entirely unfair to require our new equal citizens to vote in an entirely random manner because they don't know that they're even doing a thing called "voting". Thus we would be obligated to teach literally every animal on Earth how our electoral system works, which would first require us to teach literally every animal on Earth how to understand human languages to a degree we can explain it to them.
However, as I just said, they do not understand our system. Which means they do not even know they are "citizens of our countries" or what any of those four words mean. Which means they're going about their daily lives, completely oblivious to the fact that humans just decided to start subjecting them to human laws.
This also means that they do not know that our system of determining our territory has strictly-drawn boundaries that are actually invisible when you go to them in the real world, but which we feel VERY sensitive about being crossed. While we were debating how to include them in our elections, they were crossing the boundaries of nations by the millions. Since we are now treating them as equal citizens, this means that billions of our citizens are becoming illegal immigrants, as they damned well didn't fill out the paperwork first since we have yet to teach them anything required to understand they shouldn't have gone where they went.
I could go on, but I'll summarize the reality like this:
Your dog can now legally vote. Your job now is to teach it to understand our political system well enough to do so in an intelligent manner.
And we have to do that for literally everything that is alive within the border of your nation that is not a plant or fungus. Yes, including the insects that only have a lifespan measured in weeks.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/23 04:19:27
Pouncey wrote: Yes, including the insects that only have a lifespan measured in weeks.
Except no, because they'd have to be eighteen for both the US and Canada.
Since we've already gone down the rabbit hole here.
We're considering species with drastically different lifespans from humans to be equal citizens under the law.
That "18 years" thing is being replaced with "adult age for the citizen's species" before any election takes place. Otherwise it would be inherently unfair to disallow an entire species from ever voting because they do not live to the required age ever.
And remember, this scenario requires us to stop designing our laws entirely around humans.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/23 05:08:10
There is no such thing as a hobby without politics. "Leave politics at the door" is itself a political statement, an endorsement of the status quo and an attempt to silence dissenting voices.
Pouncey wrote: Yes, including the insects that only have a lifespan measured in weeks.
Except no, because they'd have to be eighteen for both the US and Canada.
Since we've already gone down the rabbit hole here.
We're considering species with drastically different lifespans from humans to be equal citizens under the law.
That "18 years" thing is being replaced with "adult age for the citizen's species" before any election takes place. Otherwise it would be inherently unfair to disallow an entire species from ever voting because they do not live to the required age ever.
And remember, this scenario requires us to stop designing our laws entirely around humans.
I don't see why we should change the voting age to accommodate mayflies. Voter disenfranchisement based around half-assed justifications is a proud political tradition!
Pouncey wrote: Animals aren't just things like cats and dogs. Spiders are animals too. So are ants. So are mosquitoes. Literally all insects are animals, in fact.
Not quite sure what kind of rabbit hole this is going down.
Laws are pretty much there to maintain a "civil" society.
A human one.
It is utterly pointless to apply/pretend any human thought processes used in the animal world.
Any animals that are important enough to get citizens upset when things happen to them are assigned as "property" since we do not like when people break or steal our toys.
At some point, creatures low enough on the food chain are treated with callous disregard.
You could choose to be a Buddhist:
"All living things fear being beaten with clubs.
All living things fear being put to death.
Putting oneself in the place of the other,
Let no one kill nor cause another to kill.
Dhammapada 129"
My dad is a veterinarian and I have seen animals in all manner of conditions.
I would say they deserve ethical treatment, they definitely suffer and can think and feel but do not be so foolish in thinking they can be made to think like us and be a "participating citizen".
Ideal outcome is for them to live in the wild but we have messed around with breeding of so many domesticated animals that release them into the wild would be a death sentence.
I would say trying to be a realist, any animal to be given equal status as a human in rights would require a fundamental shift in everything we do and then to figure out some way to make that/those animals aware of those rights which would probably be the hardest part of all, possibly impossible.
This is a lot of thought on a topic I feel does not deserve even this much, but hey: we come here to talk right?
A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Frazzled wrote: A dark presence surely has entered our thread...
Well, admittedly, humans aren't exactly stupid.
We looked at our bodies, saw they were incapable of flight, but we wanted to fly anyways, so we learned about physics and devised devices that let us fly and/or glide as we see fit.
Eventually we got bored with that idea and decided to see if we could travel to our moon through roughly a light-second of vacuum.
Eventually we got bored with that idea after we did it a bunch of times. Now we're entertaining the idea of sending human volunteers to live on a planet completely barren of life in an environment completely inhospitable to our existence.
All within the past century or so.
Surely leaving the relative paradise we live on to pointlessly go contaminate cold, inhospitable, dead rocks (and at great expense) is evidence of how lacking human intelligence is? Lets learn to manage one planet before we mess up more, guys!
Pouncey wrote: Animals aren't just things like cats and dogs. Spiders are animals too. So are ants. So are mosquitoes. Literally all insects are animals, in fact.
Not quite sure what kind of rabbit hole this is going down.
Laws are pretty much there to maintain a "civil" society.
A human one.
It is utterly pointless to apply/pretend any human thought processes used in the animal world.
Any animals that are important enough to get citizens upset when things happen to them are assigned as "property" since we do not like when people break or steal our toys.
At some point, creatures low enough on the food chain are treated with callous disregard.
You could choose to be a Buddhist:
"All living things fear being beaten with clubs.
All living things fear being put to death.
Putting oneself in the place of the other,
Let no one kill nor cause another to kill.
Dhammapada 129"
My dad is a veterinarian and I have seen animals in all manner of conditions.
I would say they deserve ethical treatment, they definitely suffer and can think and feel but do not be so foolish in thinking they can be made to think like us and be a "participating citizen".
Ideal outcome is for them to live in the wild but we have messed around with breeding of so many domesticated animals that release them into the wild would be a death sentence.
I would say trying to be a realist, any animal to be given equal status as a human in rights would require a fundamental shift in everything we do and then to figure out some way to make that/those animals aware of those rights which would probably be the hardest part of all, possibly impossible.
This is a lot of thought on a topic I feel does not deserve even this much, but hey: we come here to talk right?
That's my point, actually.
We can't treat non-human species as equal citizens. Our laws are for humans only.
Though frankly the voting thing pales in comparison to how you would handle the fact that carnivores are animals who need to eat other animals to live, so you'd need to have a debate on whether you let the carnivores go extinct or accept the fact that you have to let your citizens be killed and eaten to keep carnivores alive on occasion.
I'm not arguing in favor of treating other animals as equal citizens, I'm exploring what would happen if you did treat them that way, to show why it's not a good idea.
Frazzled wrote: A dark presence surely has entered our thread...
Well, admittedly, humans aren't exactly stupid.
We looked at our bodies, saw they were incapable of flight, but we wanted to fly anyways, so we learned about physics and devised devices that let us fly and/or glide as we see fit.
Eventually we got bored with that idea and decided to see if we could travel to our moon through roughly a light-second of vacuum.
Eventually we got bored with that idea after we did it a bunch of times. Now we're entertaining the idea of sending human volunteers to live on a planet completely barren of life in an environment completely inhospitable to our existence.
All within the past century or so.
Surely leaving the relative paradise we live on to pointlessly go contaminate cold, inhospitable, dead rocks (and at great expense) is evidence of how lacking human intelligence is? Lets learn to manage one planet before we mess up more, guys!
Intelligence is just the ability to learn.
Wisdom is something else entirely
Automatically Appended Next Post: When I say that I treat other species as "equals," what I mean is that I don't treat them as either superior or inferior. Just different. And when things are different, it's okay to have different rules for them to account for those differences. Dogs aren't humans, so we shouldn't have the same rules for them that we do for humans. We have to figure out which differences are important enough to be worth inventing different rules for, and species is DEFINITELY a big enough difference to be worth considering. We can also have different rules for different species, so we treat dogs differently than we do maple trees. That's what'll let us accept space aliens as citizens if any ever wish to immigrate to a human society, without also mandating that we accept EVERY species as citizens. And to be totally honest, I absolutely would accept a dog as an equal citizen if any dog ever applied for citizenship and got through the immigration process, and no, I would not accept that dog's owners meeting the requirements for them.
This message was edited 7 times. Last update was at 2016/12/24 07:08:01
Oh god, I can't believe I missed the most obvious and easy reason why this couple's request was absurd. Someone even mentioned it earlier in the thread. I put so much thought into stuff, and literally the easiest and best way to explain why it's a dumb idea is:
Dogs are not humans.
So would a dog even BENEFIT from being treated like a human child in a divorce case? Probably NOT, because the dog would have just as little clue about what was going on as they do about the fact that the pizza delivery guy he barks at, assuming is an intruder, is literally BRINGING FOOD FOR THE DOG'S HUMAN OWNERS TO EAT.
Dogs are so clueless about human society there's no reason to believe a dog would benefit from this whatsoever.
Dumb request by a dumb couple, and I'm damned glad it took nearly 150 years since Canada's independence from Britain for any Canadian to be dumb enough to try something like this.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/25 05:24:46
Pouncey wrote: That "18 years" thing is being replaced with "adult age for the citizen's species" before any election takes place. Otherwise it would be inherently unfair to disallow an entire species from ever voting because they do not live to the required age ever.
.
Those framing any such law would have to consider that the age of 18 for humans was framed for a specific reason - i.e. that at the age of 18 the human 'adult' could be expected to vote in an informed, responsible manner (they were probably wrong, but still...). A dog/cat at ANY age can't be expected to do so, ever. IOW we give legal rights and access to privileges to people based on their assumed maturity all the time (drinking, driving, voting, legal independence, sexual consent), animals would never cross the threshold for access to many of these things.
Pouncey wrote: That "18 years" thing is being replaced with "adult age for the citizen's species" before any election takes place. Otherwise it would be inherently unfair to disallow an entire species from ever voting because they do not live to the required age ever.
.
Those framing any such law would have to consider that the age of 18 for humans was framed for a specific reason - i.e. that at the age of 18 the human 'adult' could be expected to vote in an informed, responsible manner (they were probably wrong, but still...). A dog/cat at ANY age can't be expected to do so, ever. IOW we give legal rights and access to privileges to people based on their assumed maturity all the time (drinking, driving, voting, legal independence, sexual consent), animals would never cross the threshold for access to many of these things.
Exactly.
That's why we don't make them equal citizens to begin with. If we did, they wouldn't even be able to understand what that meant.
If we ever did start treating them as humans under the law, first we'd have to determine that they were inherently capable of being capable of understanding these things, and at that point, we'd have to redesign our laws to consider them equals, which means redefining all of our age limits to simply be the equivalents for their species.
We're gonna have to do it if we ever encounter space aliens who are as intelligent as humans who want to be citizens in our societies, because there's no reason that space aliens would age and mature at the same rate as humans do. We're gonna have to do it if we ever invent AI that our laws would consider people, because even an advanced AI doesn't become as mature and knowledgeable as an adult human instantly upon their first boot-up, you have to teach it anything you want it to know, and that takes time, no matter how fast your processors go.
If animals were ever considered people under the law, we'd have to accommodate their needs too, not just those of humans.
But the reality, like the judge said, is that animals are not, in fact, the same as humans, and they're so different from humans we cannot reasonably expect to treat them the same way we do humans.
Do I believe that animals are our equals, thus neither superior nor inferior, merely different? Yes. But I also believe that those differences are so massive that it's a case where "separate but equal" is the correct way of doing things, despite the historical connotations of that phrase when it was applied to two varieties of humans that were so similar that the ways they were treated differently were not merited or deserved.
We're gonna have to do it if we ever encounter space aliens who are as intelligent as humans who want to be citizens in our societies, because there's no reason that space aliens would age and mature at the same rate as humans do. We're gonna have to do it if we ever invent AI that our laws would consider people, because even an advanced AI doesn't become as mature and knowledgeable as an adult human instantly upon their first boot-up, you have to teach it anything you want it to know, and that takes time, no matter how fast your processors go.
If animals were ever considered people under the law, we'd have to accommodate their needs too, not just those of humans.
Well...not so much. You mention it yourself "space aliens who are as intelligent as humans who want to be citizens" or "AI that our laws would consider people" - you're talking about beings that are of similar mental capacity to human beings. It's easy to extrapolate laws that apply to humans in that manner. Animals, which are not of similar capacity, won't get that kind of treatment. A puppy is no less or more capable of understanding human law than an old dog - neither is capable of it at all. There's no point in applying law differently to animals based on their physical mental maturity if their mental capacity never reaches a necessary threshold for understanding that law.
We're gonna have to do it if we ever encounter space aliens who are as intelligent as humans who want to be citizens in our societies, because there's no reason that space aliens would age and mature at the same rate as humans do. We're gonna have to do it if we ever invent AI that our laws would consider people, because even an advanced AI doesn't become as mature and knowledgeable as an adult human instantly upon their first boot-up, you have to teach it anything you want it to know, and that takes time, no matter how fast your processors go.
If animals were ever considered people under the law, we'd have to accommodate their needs too, not just those of humans.
Well...not so much. You mention it yourself "space aliens who are as intelligent as humans who want to be citizens" or "AI that our laws would consider people" - you're talking about beings that are of similar mental capacity to human beings. It's easy to extrapolate laws that apply to humans in that manner. Animals, which are not of similar capacity, won't get that kind of treatment. A puppy is no less or more capable of understanding human law than an old dog - neither is capable of it at all. There's no point in applying law differently to animals based on their physical mental maturity if their mental capacity never reaches a necessary threshold for understanding that law.
I'm pretty sure that's what I said in the parts of the post that you cropped out.
I'm pretty sure that's what I said in the parts of the post that you cropped out.
I wasn't sure, it seemed to me you had shifted gears to a more general argument at that point.
Well, really, my opinion this whole time has been that the judge was correct.
I've only been exploring the hypothetical of what would happen if we did treat a dog like a human in the eyes of the law, precisely in order to show why it's a really, REALLY bad idea.
If your opinion is that we shouldn't treat dogs as being the same as humans, I agree. I've agreed this whole time.
Read the words I write my descriptions with. They generally involve the form "If we were to X, then Y would naturally have to result."
If we don't do X, then Y does not result, does it? And just because we can do something, does not mean we must do that thing.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I mean, you ever consider that maybe treating a dog like a human in a divorce proceeding might have more wide-reaching ramifications than just divorce proceedings?
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/12/28 05:31:29
Read the words I write my descriptions with. They generally involve the form "If we were to X, then Y would naturally have to result."
If we don't do X, then Y does not result, does it? And just because we can do something, does not mean we must do that thing.
Actually, I can still argue that even if we don't do X, if we did happen to consider doing X, that we should consider if Y would be logically correct. It's fun!
And yeah, treating a dog as a human in a divorce could have HUGE unintended consequences, which is why judges generally don't tolerate touch stuff like that. That's for lawmakers or the supreme court to hash out.
John Prins wrote: Actually, I can still argue that even if we don't do X, if we did happen to consider doing X, that we should consider if Y would be logically correct. It's fun!
You're actually right. I dunno why I didn't consider the possibility that the judge could have just rules that even though we generally consider dogs to be so different from humans they're not the same, in this case, treating them as human children for this specific purpose is beneficial enough that we can allow it, even though we don't have to allow dogs to have the full range of responsibilities, rights, and privileges that humans do.
We don't even let all humans vote. Human children aren't allowed to vote until they grow up into human adults, and the couple was asking for their presumably adult dog to be treated as a human child. I've even heard people say the exact phrase, "Dogs are like 2-year-olds," and one of the people I've heard say that owned a dog for nearly a decade along with raising three children of his own, so he had enough experience with both to consider it valid.
So probably the reality is that a dog simply wouldn't benefit from being treated as a human child would in this situation, and that's why the judge ruled against it. It wouldn't help the dog to do this, and if it would, there's no reason why doing that would mean we have to do anything else, since dogs are probably so clueless about human societies they don't even know what marriage is. Dogs who respond to specific words humans say don't actually understand the language they're spoken in, they simply associate that word with something they're supposed to do. If you wanted to, you could convince a dog that any word you say infrequently, like, for example, any word in a language you don't speak but are capable of pronouncing, is actually the word that means you're taking them for a walk.
Police dogs are actually trained with words in uncommon languages - for example, I think the standard in the USA is German, since people in the USA don't often speak German around police officers - to prevent the dog from inadvertently reacting to something someone says by a careless slip of the tongue. The only reason that they're trained with the words that are the equivalent translation of the command being ordered is that the exact word doesn't matter at all to the dog, but the human officers simply find it easier to remember the word for a command that's the word humans understand to mean that command.
So a dog being treated like a human child is pointless for the courts to do. The dog doesn't understand a damned thing going on, because the humans around it are using so many words that it doesn't associate with anything, they're just those random noises humans make a lot, even when no one's around. The dog doesn't understand what they mean, but the dog doesn't feel like it has to, because the dog still gets fed, still gets loved, still gets petted, still gets taken for walks, and it understands the noises used for THOSE situations, and that's good enough.
I mean, human languages are complex enough that just being able to speak them means our larynxes had to evolve to be so large that we are the only animals on Earth who cannot both breathe and swallow at the same time. Dogs never die from choking on their food, because they just breathe while eating, so they never, like, choke on their food because they can inhale and swallow simultaneously without any issues.
Human languages are, in all seriousness, the most complex form of communication on Earth. Ever hear a bird song? Imagine each note of that particular species' song is in fact, the equivalent of a word. Count up the number of words their language has. This'll be easy to do, because that number is small enough you can probably hear every word in their language spoken in real-time over a span of less than 10 seconds, and someone probably recorded that at some point. Count up the number of unique words in this post.
Basically, animals aren't physically capable of understanding us, because we'd have to explain ourselves to them for them to understand us, and teaching them our language is IMPOSSIBLE.
And yeah, treating a dog as a human in a divorce could have HUGE unintended consequences, which is why judges generally don't tolerate touch stuff like that. That's for lawmakers or the supreme court to hash out.
I dunno how it works exactly.
My understanding of Canadian law is that a judge makes a ruling on something. That ruling can then be appealed, at which point it goes up the chain to the next layer of courts. Eventually it gets to the Supreme Court of Canada, who make the final and absolute say for all time. And sometimes it never makes it there, because there's no guarantee it'll turn out in your favor, and both sides of a debate are so unwilling to ever get a final answer that might be against them that the police simply refuse to charge people with things that are actually felonies, because even prosecutors don't want to charge anyone with it since the Supreme Court, which is where it WILL (not might, WILL) end up the next time someone's charged with it, might say, "This is not a crime." Defence attorneys for the last person who was charged with it didn't push it higher either, because the Supreme Court could just as easily uphold the law.
Where might Canadian law be THAT uncertain about a felony?
Well, technically in Canada, it's a felony if you copy music from one form of hardware to another. Say, if you rip a CD you buy, to your computer's hard drive. That's actually a felony in Canada. Downloading a song for free from the Internet though? That's fine, the government says it's totally legal in fact, because it's going from one hard drive to another, so you're not changing the type of hardware involved. Uploading music to the Internet? That's a crime that no one argues about being a crime. Basically it's not illegal to BE a pirate, only to SUPPLY pirates. And that all only applies to music. Movies, TV shows, even video games and books have entirely different rules.
My understanding of Canadian law is that a judge makes a ruling on something. That ruling can then be appealed, at which point it goes up the chain to the next layer of courts. Eventually it gets to the Supreme Court of Canada, who make the final and absolute say for all time.
Mostly the Supreme Court deals with issues of laws being Constitutional or not, as that's held as the final say in law. A lot of stuff these days going to the Supreme Court involves the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, an amendment to the Constitution that is often used to strike down provincial/federal laws because regular laws can't trump the Constitution.
The Constitution doesn't mention animals AFAIK, and getting the Constitution changed can only be done unanimously (literally) by both the Federal and Provincial/Territorial levels of government. Because of this, it's unlikely animal rights/welfare law would ever make it to the level of the Supreme Court of Canada; lower levels of the justice system are supposed to deal with that sort of thing.
Interestingly, marriage and divorce laws are largely federal affairs, but marital property laws seem to be provincial - so this situation could have different results in different provinces, but I imagine most judges will follow the precedent set in this one case.
As for legal uncertainly, every country has laws that don't really get enforced much, especially when no physical harm is happening to someone. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms created a situation where a lot of laws might be overruled by it, but getting laws repealed is time consuming and expensive, so it's just easier to not enforce those laws with the understanding that they're just invalid at this point.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/28 17:19:09
I would like to add that I have personally gone through a divorce involving no children, yet 2 dogs that were effectively our children. It was hard. Even though my ex-wife and I split in the most civil of ways (we just realized it wasn't working) I am still upset about splitting up our dogs. But it only seemed fair that we each take 1. BOTH of the dogs grieved for almost a year. They may not have understood what was happening, but it was VERY clear that they knew something was very different.
Dogs, like humans, are incredibly social animals. More so, they have a shared existence in human society for over 10,000 years (waaaaaayyy longer than any other domestic animal, even Cats). Dogs are one of the only animal besides humans that commonly seeks eye contact with humans. Almost all other animals actively try to avoid eye contact with us. Dogs are part of our identity as a species. Period.
Am I trying to say that they deserve the same rights as a human child? Of course not
But dogs do not exist in nature. They are quite different than their wolf ancestors. This is because we, the humans, have made them in our image (through selective breeding). As a species, we share many of the same responsibilities to dogs that parents share to their children. The key differences are that dogs do not grow to be full independent of us like children (hopefully) will. Nor do they become contributing productive members of human society. That is where there rights stop.
We are responsible for dogs. We made them, took them from nature and reshaped them forever. They should be treated with more rights than mere property.
-
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/12/28 17:26:00
Galef wrote: I would like to add that I have personally gone through a divorce involving no children, yet 2 dogs that were effectively our children. It was hard. Even though my ex-wife and I split in the most civil of ways (we just realized it wasn't working) I am still upset about splitting up our dogs. But it only seemed fair that we each take 1. BOTH of the dogs grieved for almost a year. They may not have understood what was happening, but it was VERY clear that they knew something was very different.
Dogs, like humans, are incredibly social animals. More so, they have a shared existence in human society for over 10,000 years (waaaaaayyy longer than any other domestic animal, even Cats).
Dogs are one of the only animal besides humans that commonly seeks eye contact with humans. Almost all other animals actively try to avoid eye contact with us.
Dogs are part of our identity as a species. Period.
Am I trying to say that they deserve the same rights as a human child? Of course not
But dogs do not exist in nature. They are quite different than their wolf ancestors. This is because we, the humans, have made them in our image (through selective breeding).
As a species, we share many of the same responsibilities to dogs that parents share to their children.
The key differences are that dogs do not grow to be full independent of us like children (hopefully) will. Nor do they become contributing productive members of human society.
That is where there rights stop.
We are responsible for dogs. We made them, took them from nature and reshaped them forever. They should be treated with more rights than mere property.
-
My understanding is that dogs chose to work with humans as much as we chose to work with them. It was a mutually-beneficial situation, so two species opted to work together, because if the wolves simply ran away from humans like all other animals, or attacked us on sight, we could never have domesticated them. They would have avoided us, like all the other species we do not domesticate.
We didn't just choose them. They came to us, we didn't turn them away. It was a mutual decision by the two species to work together.
And given how most pet dogs are treated (I hope) by their human owners, it worked out pretty damned well for the dogs too. But they never needed to learn our languages at all to perform their roles, only to learn a few, key human words because they are the only ones we say that are important to them in some way.
You ever wonder why dogs understand what humans pointing at things means? Why they understand us so well? Because when you're effectively in the same pack as humans, understanding things like pointing results in millions of pounds of net gain in raw meat over the duration the two species have been together.
And at the time, human technology was fairly primitive. Hunting with dogs wasn't merely a sport, that were how humans hunted enough meat to keep themselves alive.
And even the modern day, we still have valid uses for dogs. The police and military make use of dogs by training them to alert us when they detect the scent of things humans care about - namely, drugs and explosives.
And you really, really don't have to remind me that dogs miss people when they go away and never came back. My dad died of cancer this past May, and I will spare you the details past that point. My dog, which had lived with us since 2007, probably figured out my dad was gonna die all on his own, and came to terms with it somehow. Dogs don't believe humans are immortal, so they know we die some day too. They probably know they die too, and if they notice how fast they age compared to humans, they know their owners are likely to outlive them.
And the reason I keep mentioning death here, is because you can't actually tell a dog anything, which means you can't inform it of events it didn't see happen. It has no reason to believe that a human who goes away alive, who never comes home because they die somewhere the dog doesn't see it happen, is even dead at all, instead of simply having a valid reason to not come back yet. My brother moved out after we got our dog, and he still shows up to visit sometimes. My dog still remembers him.
My dad never came back though. And I think my dog doesn't miss him, because given that my dog saw my dad's deterioration, absolutely did not assume that kind of thing was a good indicator of health, then one day my dad left, and there was much, much sadness over the next few days... Well, dogs are dumb compared to humans, but they're still relatively smart for animals. I think my dog knows my dad isn't ever coming back, because my dog knows it doesn't see everything happen that happens, and given what it saw happen there, it probably just assumes my dad ended up dead. It doesn't assume that for my brother, because he wasn't obviously sick when he left, and he keeps coming back, so he's obviously not dead and there's no reason to think he is.
They're not that much different from humans in some ways. Humans simply assume people are still alive until we have a reason to believe they're dead. Because we're humans, we speak human languages, which are capable of communicating that fact very easily. We simply attribute a lot of importance to a person's death (not saying it's not deserved, but it is very important for humans, and it is important for dogs, but it wouldn't be for a hive mind insect like ants or bees), so we tend to tell everyone we know at some point. However, until you tell them, they didn't know.
Ever fall out of touch with a friend for many years, then get back in touch with them, you talk for a while, one of you asks the other about a friend or relative, and it turns out that that person died years earlier? You ever notice the bit of surprise in the person's voice who says something like that? Maybe they're not surprised at the other person not knowing someone was dead. Maybe the surprise is simply in realizing they totally forgot to mention that at the start of the conversation.
Because even humans get through the trauma of losing a loved one, to the point we don't even consider it worth mentioning anymore when an old friend gets back in touch and you start catching up. As harsh as it sounds, life does move on, and more recent things are more important.
People can still learn to find happiness in our lives despite the reality that we are all mortal. Dogs can too. Dogs can get used to humans not only going away forever, but even dying right in front of them, and knowing they will never come back. It doesn't stop them from being happy about other things later in their lives.
I don't even remember what my point was. Ending post.
Pouncey wrote: Human languages are, in all seriousness, the most complex form of communication on Earth. Ever hear a bird song? Imagine each note of that particular species' song is in fact, the equivalent of a word. Count up the number of words their language has. This'll be easy to do, because that number is small enough you can probably hear every word in their language spoken in real-time over a span of less than 10 seconds, and someone probably recorded that at some point. Count up the number of unique words in this post.
Maybe not, if you remember we can`t understand whales's singing. But that's another point.
SkaerKrow wrote : "We killed our own gods. What chance do you have against us?"
Kurgash wrote: "Necrons, a dead race that is more dead than anyone else. So dead that they rebuild themselves just to die again!"
I for one welcome our fur covered, legally non-human, overlords.
Klawz-Ramming is a subset of citrus fruit?
Gwar- "And everyone wants a bigger Spleen!"
Mercurial wrote:
I admire your aplomb and instate you as Baron of the Seas and Lord Marshall of Privateers.
Orkeosaurus wrote:Star Trek also said we'd have X-Wings by now. We all see how that prediction turned out.
Orkeosaurus, on homophobia, the nature of homosexuality, and the greatness of George Takei.
English doesn't borrow from other languages. It follows them down dark alleyways and mugs them for loose grammar.
