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Post by dantesvirgil on Oct 16, 2009 14:24:21 GMT -5
You might have known a 10 year old stray, but that is not the norm for stray cats. Ferals have a longer life span, but at most it's about five years on average.
What I'm driving at Yaezakura, is that saying it benefits them to be domesticated as some sort of proof that it's good for the animal is something of a circular situation. It's not a given that an animal suffers from more predator attacks in the wild -- deer population is exploding right now, so are elks. We've actually killed off most of their predators, so when you compare "the wild" to domesticated animals, you're not looking at a situation where humans have no interference. Feral hogs in the Deep South are also exploding population-wise.
If the argument is that they benefit because we keep them alive, my point is that in some cases they wouldn't even have existed in the first place until we bred them into existence. We also don't always domesticate a species for the better, as the point about purebred dogs demonstrates. Purebred dogs suffer specifically because of domestication techniques.
It's not as cut and dried as simply saying domestication = good.
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Post by dantesvirgil on Oct 16, 2009 14:35:15 GMT -5
Let me explain it another way. Ignoring the moral equivalency of a cow and a person for a moment (which I do not morally equate the two, although I am definitely pro some animal rights), it would be the same sort of argument if I took you and kept you in a confined area all of your life, let you out when I thought it benefitted you, penned you in when I thought it was important, made sure you got all your shots, bred you with only the "right" people, fed you a certain diet, etc. Now, you might come out "better" in the end. Maybe you'd be less apt to be injured by something; maybe you'd live a longer lifespan, etc. But it's a bit circular for me to say to you that what I'm doing to you "benefits you 100%" because I'm keeping you alive. Of course I'm keeping you alive, and that in itself, I assume, is what you're claiming domestication is good for (plus the bonus of getting antibiotics, diet, etc), and you might "owe" your existence to me because I make sure you're protected and fed -- but it doesn't follow that "benefits you 100%." That's an argument that favors the keeper, not the kept. And yes, I know that cows and people aren't the same.
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