This is fiercely wholesome
…We’ve committed a multi-thousand year long genocide against dogs, breeding them for traits that we find useful, and usually killing the puppies that don’t possess useful traits…
Maltese covered in tumors at 8 years old? That’s totally normal. Just like the cancer it inevitably will develop.
Meanwhile feral dog breeds can live up to 17 years just like wild wolves do. Though in the wild, the average lifespan is 5 years. Because of disease or injury.
Eugenics is not inherently bad, it’s just frequently used as an excuse to do really evil shit.
Eugenics is bad because it’s based on fundamentally incorrect ideas about how genetics plays into personal development. Galton drew specifically upon the fundamentally incorrect ideas of scientific racism, and wrote about Eugenics as being a means to better improve the superior races. Galton argued that things like poverty and mass suffering could have been solved this way, essentially arguing that it was the personal incompetence of the less fortunate which lead them into misfortune (also fundamentally incorrect).
Even if you drop the baggage of scientific racism, Eugenics is still conceptually ableist, choosing to eliminate those we deem disabled rather than finding solutions to better their lives.
On top of that, we were kind of hinging on sequencing the human genome giving us the insight to how genetic diseases work, the single possible case that eugenic thought might have had a use in. This has since fallen through. Further research into genetics has also demonstrated just how unreadable DNA is right now. We are still nowhere near being able to predict most genetic diseases based on the genetics of a couple.
I also cannot think of a single thing that eugenics implies should be done that isn’t absolutely evil. I’d argue that things that only encourage evil actions are themselves evil.
Sorry to disappoint you, but even just picking your partner off of looks is literally a form of eugenics if you preach being attracted to your partner… Parents who decide to abort a fetus with a terminal illness is ALSO literally and directly eugenics.
Eugenics itself isn’t bad, it’s just certain morons think THEY deserve to decide such things for and about others.
no that’s part of natural selection. it’s our biology telling us what we want. eugenics is systemic planned pairing and breeding. it’s also had the ideas that a person’s quality is defined at birth baked into it from the start. it’s based on the concept of a person’s worth being defined by the circumstances of their birth and not by their efforts in life.
also, actual science tells us that the best thing to “breed for”,if that’s the way you want to look at life, is genetic diversity. the healthiest stock has the most diverse gene pool. something every eugenicist also somehow manages to ignore that and deny that if improving or genetics is our goal we should be trying to all become a neutral brown and choose people the most different from us genetically.
cause that’s the thing about dog breeds. we can engineer the perfect biological hunting machine… that dies by age 11 at the latest. because breeding for a trait never creates healthy offspring. which makes sense, we weren’t breeding for health. the natural desire of most parents is a healthy child. it’s what nature optimized for. when we start looking for other traits we tend to fuck it up.
That last part may need a bit of citation, but yes modern breed standardization has unfortunately crippled many of the poor creatures from birth.
Adopt rescues, people! It’s usually super cheap and they’re almost always healthier dogs anyway.
But then what about, say, cows? They were domesticated too, but to the extent that they subjectively like and trust humans (and I’ve seen very friendly cows) they have been deceived, with very few exceptions. Maybe we deserve them in the purely material sense since they are the products of our labor, but they don’t deserve us…
Perhaps not individually - although even there, what is the average lifespan of a cow in the wild? - but collectively there have been far more cow offspring than there would have been if they had not been domesticated.
Also, looking at every other wild species that we’ve eradicated, they seem to have decided to get in on our good side, which since they aren’t extinct may have worked out well for them.
And even individually, if they live >3x longer, in a more comfortable environment where food is provided routinely… it’s arguably not as bad a trade-off as it first appears.
A lifetime of slavery ending in death, or try to outcompete the species that invented guns? We might each make a different choice, but they made theirs.
I have heard that argument for animal husbandry, but in today’s world the comfortable environment is provided to only a tiny fraction of livestock. If I had the choice to either be a random pig or chicken nowadays, or just nothingness, I rather not exist at all. What’s the point of living 3 times longer when you hardly have enough space to even turn around and stand in your own shit? If anything, the longer life span makes it worse.
Damn… good point.
I was even all set to argue back with like: each individual cow makes their own choice, as in the ones who fight back against the system get killed, whereas those who simply accept it as-is continue to exist, leading us to today where those who are left are those who are genetically predisposed to not fight (but theoretically, they could still fight back?). And that even before we delved into direct genetic manipulation, to increase the meat-to-effort ratio. Maybe one day we’ll design cows that just walk directly into our mouths and beg us to chew them?
So humans in essence foundationally altered what a “cow” even is - like imagine a wild boar that humans actually feared, vs. today’s mere “pigs”. What is left is a shadow of the former glory that the true bovine herbivore ruminant was in its prime heyday. i.e. nobody alive to today has ever seen a true “cow” (unless like boars there is some wild variant somewhere, not descendants of some escapee but a truly untouched species?).
That’s all on us. As people elsewhere are saying, we treat cows almost as bad as we treat humans beings.
Perhaps that is why shows like The Matrix are so horrifying - it’s what we would do (/ are already doing), if the situation were reversed.
Those “monsters” from the dark were the real heroes back when — braving the orange flickering light that instinctually meant death to sneak scraps from the stabby skin-wearers… Sounds like the original D&D story to me, NGL.
domesticating wolves by campfire with just body language would be a bad ass RPG VR game
*Alien ship arrives into orbit. It’s powerful energy weapons aimed at major population centers.*
Alien Ship: “Attention experiment 2648.996. It has been 50,000 orbits since your last status report. Name one good thing you have accomplished since we allowed you free reign over this planet.”
*Humans hold their beloved dogs as they look up in fear. Dogs lovingly lick their humans.*
Alien Ship: “Well done 2648.996. Well done.”