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Comment by swalling | Hacker News Reader

Say that to dogs, who have co-evolved with humans over thousands of years to a level that not only do they look completely different from wolves, but they can happily digest food that a wolf cannot.

Dogs like to be with people. Even free-roaming street dogs will usually live in close proximity to people. A well-cared for household dog or cat is one of the most happy, pampered beings who ever lived, often cared for at a level akin to human children.

Absolutist anti-pet thinking is how PETA ends up euthanizing 97% of the pets it receives at its shelter.

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My conviction comes from having owned a dog, and realizing after a couple of years that it will never have the life in a pack roaming the lands that it obviously craved (“obvious” after observing its behavior for long enough). I don’t think a healthy co-evolution can be claimed when the animal is not free to act independently, i.e. without being coerced (like being taken on a leash or otherwise physically constrained). I’m more sympathetic to cats as pets, if they can come and go as they please.

Your conclusion may have been correct about your dog, but extending that to all dogs is pretty large and ridiculous leap. Dogs view their people as family members (which is what a pack is), and many other people’s dogs get to have a healthy group of dog friends as well. You sound like a person who just failed to keep a happy dog and developed a rationalization that all dog ownership is morally wrong.

Dog domestication is generally thought to be an example of commensalism, and potentially mutualism. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fvets.2021.6623... In other words, it only happened in the first place because a group of wolves benefited from association with people. Pleistocene hunter-gatherers did not have the physical ability to force a grown wolf to be captive if it did not want to be.

A dog that requires a leash or an active restraint to prevent it from running away is not representative of dog ownership in general. My dog has no interest in running away and the only time I have to use a leash is when it’s imposed by local ordinance.

If your dog wanted to run away it probably had a shitty life.

Different breeds, and different dogs within those breeds, have different drives.

I know some well-trained dogs that will still gleefully run away and explore the woods if given the chance... and then return sheepishly 20-30 minutes later. If they ever do get lost, or someone else "finds" them, etc, it'll be a tragedy.

They also tend to come back covered in thorns, with cut-up paws, etc, etc.

My nextdoor feed is filled with run away dogs. I think your experience might be slightly less common than you think.

For those as confused as I was, Nextdoor: some sort of social thing.

Not a feedlot nextdoor to OP.

Survivor bias. Your nextdoor feed doesn’t have posts about the orders of magnitude more dogs that aren’t running away.

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