100% agree with you. Keeping a "pet" locked on your home for the purpose of vanity and keeping you entertained for a few mins/day is outrageous. Praising animal rights but choosing to ignore this is the ultimate hypocrisy.
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.
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.