set him free - who gives you the right to enslave "your" dog?
Pets offer an extremely potent form of emotional therapy, and that is a very personal connection that has nothing at all to do with vanity or entertainment. Both of the latter are typically secondary effects, not primary.
Well, of course, I didn't type my comment by accident!
Regarding your point:
Number of service dogs in the US: ~500,000 [1]
Number of dogs kept as pets in the US: ~76 million [2]
It's not even 1%. I understand the argument you bring but in practice is literally a rounding error. The overwhelming majority of pets serve a function of vanity and/or entertainment.
1: https://share.america.gov/service-dogs-save-lives/ 2: https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/reports-statistics/us-p...
Service dogs do save lives, and are immensely important, but that is explicitly not my point.
I am talking about the fact that many pet-owners do gain emotional value and support from animals. Emotional animal support can be extremely effective therapy for humans, but would not count as a service animal. However, I don't think that anyone in their right mind would argue that situation is a function of vanity and/or entertainment.
And before you go try and find data: no, there aren't a lot of registered 'therapy animals,' because that is a hot-topic political issue, and people don't differentiate them well from service animals. Not to mention that society continues to think 'mental health problems' are mostly either made-up or to be looked down upon.
There not being a lot of registered ones does not mean that the emotional support and stability gained by having a pet does not do absolute wonders from a therapeutic perspective.
It has been formalized a bit[1], but has been going on informally for centuries, since animals and humans do form close emotional bonds.
You do not derive the same emotional value from eating meat. One is sustenance, and the other has been bred for centuries to have an extreme emotional connection with humans.
Because, ...
>you are making assumptions here that are invalid
... I would really like to know which side of the story is the most plausible one.
Or we let them breed, but we pick their partners and then take their babies. If we did this to humans there would be outrage right?
Just letting them free would be cruel, because the domesticated animals and surrounding ecosystem have not adapted to eachother. They will probably either hurt the ecosystem (cats and pigs) or die out after losing human care (cattle).
It doesn't seem ethical at all to just pretend that domesticated animals are people and so need human rights. They need animal rights, which depending on the species may be completely different.
In your example of me personally, this is kind of the tradeoff most small humans (including myself) made for the first ten years of life. Supervision, lack of freedom, etc. in exchange for food, shelter, and hopefully companionship.
As it's not ideal, I could agree with you on reducing breeding so we don't have to make this choice in the future. But currently, for domesticated animals who can't be released into the wild without high chance of extreme pain to themselves (dogs) or major ecological damage (cats), it seems like our kindest option is to put as many of them in loving & protective situations as possible.
That has nothing to do with me wanting to own a pet, and everything to do with there being plenty of pets available who I would rather get loved by someone than, well, die on the street.
This kind of personifying glib is what gives vegan/vegetarian ethics a bad name. It completely ignores domestication and how dogs evolved as human-following scavenger animals. Most dog breeds are not adapted to living without humans. Dogs in the wild live much shorter lives and get parasites.
Yes, I am a sentient dog with an internet connection.
>Dogs in the wild live much shorter lives and get parasites.
This is true of humans as well. Honestly, I think a dog would outlast many of us in the wild. Your point is moot.
You aren't a dog, so your preference for not living under the care of a human owner is not relevant. Dogs do not outlast us in the wild, because "the wild" is the real world we live in today. Stray dogs are invasive in most ecosystems, and are usually not well adapted to their environments.
Dogs are intelligent enough to show preferences, and thanks to tens of thousands of years of selective breeding, they generally prefer people. Strays are a tragedy.
But somehow you, who are not a dog as well (I presume), just happen to know that dogs prefer domestic life.
Nice dissonance there, pal.
I posit that dogs on average prefer domestic life because they were selectively bred to prefer it for thousands of years. I am honestly surprised this is controversial. We know for a fact that many dog breeds are not compatible with living in nature without human help, and would not survive.
What is the ethical thing to do now, that we cannot change the past, and domesticated animals exist? I don't think breeding dogs is ethical. I also don't think lettings dogs out into nature is ethical, at all.
To put it lightly, I don't think this idea holds water in the general case.