Is this sarcasm? I fail to understand how taking a dog from a loving household into scrounging on the streets is at all an ethical solution.
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.
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.
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.