tributarium

tributarium, 3 months ago

Speciesist take!

I grew up having pets, was responsible for a cat a little over a year ago, and literally logged on because I have been out there touching grass and can’t stand what I see anymore. Telling that all of your benefits are only benefits for the human owner.

Here’s the Vox article if anyone is curious, which is written professionally & convincingly & not out of despair like my post: vox.com/…/pets-dogs-cats-animal-welfare-boredom

tributarium, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Dogs are a special case when it comes to arguing about contemporary pet ownership imo because of their uniquely entangled history with humans. (Human beings have had relationships with other animals “since time immemorial”–both prey/predator relations as well as cooperation like the Hadza honeyguide bird–but to my knowledge domestication per se is quite a new phenomenon. “Domestication” itself is a pretty polysemous term that needs further defining ig.) But that said, even though I absolutely tend towards thinking of foraging, pre-agricultural life as a space of strong egalitarianism, including on an interspecies level–perhaps to the point of idealising or romanticising–I don’t think anyone can presume to understand those early dynamics. I’d like to think dogs were partners rather than property, but I don’t know. I think in any case the truth cannot help but be more complicated than the attitude of “my pet is my baby and I love him and he loves me with his cute eyes and that’s the natural order of things!”

tributarium, 3 months ago

Are you vegan or do you agree with the critiques of speciesism in other contexts?

“Stop typing, I believe nothing that you say about your history or what you’ve seen” doesn’t inspire much engagement in any case but there are some premises that I & this community generally take for granted that you…may not.

tributarium, 3 months ago

I’ve been listening to Karen Bakker often lately (I may even read her book sometime) and if what she says about AI and other new technology being able to give us a method of interspecies communication is true…jesus christ, the moral revolution will be copernican.