Against Dog Ownership

Author's partial conclusions to save you a click:

• Somewhere between many and most dog breeds should only be owned in ideal settings – farms, ranches, wilderness, etc. Owning the dogs outside of these circumstances is likely cruel.
• Most dog owners should buy small-to-mid sized breeds with a long genetic history of high sociability and little-to-no history of work. Such dogs are the most well-suited to modern ownership. Cockapoos are actually a really good choice by these standards.
• Unless you have a really good reason to get a thoroughbred, you should probably rescue a mutt from a dog shelter instead. Mutts are healthier, don’t contribute to the continued genetic deformity of purebreds, and can be rescued from misery and/or death in shelters.
• Unless you have the resources to pay for a doggy-day-care where the dog spends all days with other dogs, you probably shouldn’t own a dog if you have a full time job.

This is a case of "are you asking the right question" for me. If the question is "are you giving your dog its best life," most dog owners will have to say no. If the question is "are you giving your dog a better life than it would have if you did not acquire the dog," most people who get dogs from shelters can honestly say yes. Living in a shelter or being euthanized seems clearly worse than a penned-in, neutered life as a coddled pet.

The author makes some good points, but:

• I think they worry too much about the submissiveness of the relationship. I think it's a much more common desire than people acknowledge. Not just in terms of sexuality, but in terms of a desire for a father figure or a great leader to tell people what to do. So it's a common desire not just for particular moments, but in how people live their whole lives
• I don't agree with the point about relationship being invalid because you don't have to work for it. I agree that this would be bad in a romantic relationship because it'd hamper your personal development, but I really don't think that getting a cat instead of a dog will have a large effect. In fact, the safety provided by the unconditionality of a pets love may provide someone with the safety to take more risks in their relationships in the real world
• I don't think dogs need meaning in quite the same way as humans. They acknowledge that they've personified them to an extent and try to show their argument holds anyway. However, I don't think they've entirely avoided the personification trap. I don't deny that dogs may have instincts such as hunting or herding that are unfulfilled in modern life. This are instincts and we should be concerned with them being unfulfilled, but I don't think we should equate them with a life purpose.

In any case, dogs as pets probably increase the empathy for animals significantly, so we should encourage more pets, not less.

I came in agreeing with several of the author's conclusions (many 'aesthetic' breeds are animal cruelty, owning a dog as a single person with a full-time job is probably cruel, dogs are a poor substitute for children, etc.), and yet found something about the article highly offputting.

First is that I think "dominance" is the wrong frame, and having the wrong frame often generates lots of "well, I don't disagree with what you're saying in any particular sentence, but somehow I disagree with the whole thing."

I think from the dog-owner's perspective, the right frame is closer to 'being needed.' Think about the greentext about shrimp and this bit of The Bell Curve:

The broadest goal is a society in which people throughout the functional range of intelligence can find, and feel they have found, a valued place for themselves. For “valued place,” we offer a pragmatic definition: You occupy a valued place if other people would miss you if you were gone. The fact that you would be missed means that you were valued. Both the quality and quantity of valued places are important. Most people hope to find a soulmate for life, and that means someone who would “miss you” in the widest and most intense way. The definition captures the reason why children are so important in defining a valued place. But besides the quality of the valuing, quantity too is important. If a single person would miss you and no one else, you have a fragile hold on your place in society, no matter how much that one person cares for you. To have many different people who would miss you, in many different parts of your life and at many levels of intensity, is a hallmark of a person whose place is well and thoroughly valued. One way of thinking about policy options is to ask whether they aid or obstruct this goal of creating valued places.

That said, many of the same complaints apply--why not be needed for something productive, instead of manufacturing something where the need is the feature, instead of the bug? If no one in your life needs you, and you buy/rescue a dog and now one dog needs you, is that an improvement / is that healthy? 

I think the answer is "yes," and thinking about the word "healthy" clarifies why. Suppose someone is writing about food, and points out the ways in which food grown without pesticides is healthier than food grown with pesticides. If you're worried about second-order effects, of what additional chemicals you're ingesting, this is right; if you're worried about first-order effects, of whether or not you'll be malnourished, this is wrong. (As an important background fact, pesticides increase yields, such that organic farms produce fewer calories per unit of land and effort.)

In general, I try to be allergic to the "everyone should have <luxury version> of <good>" argument, because in fact people are better off living in tenements than living on the street, and if we had more tenements we might have fewer people living on the street, and so banning tenements is probably harmful. Similarly with minimum wage laws, and so on and so on.

Consider this section: 

What does it say about a human who enjoys this emotional transaction? It says that on some level they like the idea of having dominance over another being. And, they want that dominance to be a feature of their daily life.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with enjoying dominance, per se. Sexual dominance is clearly a popular tendency, and likewise, the desire to dominate others in competitions is a useful inborn characteristic which incentivizes ambitiousness and effort. I think identifying and pursuing both of those forms of dominance can bring pleasure and satisfaction in a healthy way.

That is, the author isn't opposed to dominance, or A being better than B. They just think there are good ways to do it and sad ways to do it, and dog ownership is one of the sad ways. If we analogize to video games, they're claiming that playing competitively is good, and only scrubs play against AI instead of other humans.

There's a part of this that seems right--people who win at competitive video games are better at gaming than people who can't win, and people who win competitions / status games are better at competing than people who can't win those competitions--but also a part that seems mistaken, in that it won't be the case that everyone can be above average, unless you include competitors that are 'outside everyone' while still engaging in the correct way.

And in especially in the context of "minimum wage laws" or "looking down on the worse version of things", it seems especially cruel to cut off opportunities for people who aren't very needed / aren't very respected to get an easy source of need and respect, not because it's harmful but because it reflects poorly on them for being on the bottom of the pyramid. That is, in an ordered system, someone is going to be on the bottom, and we get to decide whether it's people or dogs.

[There's a different argument you can make, where you say the relationship is bad for the other side; I currently think it's the case that humanity has made a pretty good deal with cows from the cow's point of view, for example, but don't think that humanity has made a pretty good deal with chickens from the chicken's point of view. The author considers this argument but only accepts it in a limited way, in approximately the same way I do, but I think the 'family dogs' and 'lapdogs' have way more meaning than the author thinks.]

Minor note - having spent significant time in multiple homes with one dog and more recently a home with multiple, my anecdotal observation is that even just having 2 dogs changes the dynamic from dog obsessed with humans to dogs that have each other and are maybe still obsessed with their humans as well.

Spoilers for people who don't want dogs ruined for them.

Reminds me of an old essay I wrote (not fully representative of Aaron!2021) about experiences with a dog who lived with a family but not other dogs, and could never get enough stimulation to meet his needs. A section I think still holds up:

The only “useful” thing he ever fetches is the newspaper, once per day. For thirty seconds, he is doing purposeful work. and his family is genuinely thankful for his help. But every other object he’s fetched has been something a person threw, for the express purpose of fetching. We all smile at him out of politeness or vague amusement and keep throwing the tennis balls and rubber bones, so he gets a constant stream of positive reinforcement for fetching.

This means his life is built around convincing people to throw things, and then bringing the things back to be thrown again. Literally running in circles. I’ve seen him play fetch for well over an hour before getting tired, taking a short break, drinking some water, and then coming back for more fetch.

And he really believes that his fetching is important: When a tennis ball rolls under a couch and he can’t reach it, he’ll sniff around as though it were lost. If he smells it, he’ll paw frantically trying to reach it. If he can’t, he’ll stand there looking miserable until someone reaches under and takes out the ball.

(I wonder how he feels in those moments: An impending sense of doom? Fear that the ball, lost out of sight, may cease to exist? A feeling of something-not-finished, as when a melody is cut short before the final note?)

Interesting. Does this imply you've solved the comparison-with-nonexistence problem? Presuming dog populations are pretty much defined by human behavior, keeping a dog is a net dog-life additional to not-keeping one. That dog's life is less ideal than one on a farm, but that's not the comparison you're making. Is it less ideal than not existing at all?

[ n.b. I have two cats, no dogs, though I have a number of friends with dogs. The animals in question live much easier and less interesting lives than their evolutionary environment, and do not seem unhappy (though, yes, often bored or annoyed). Note also that this describes me pretty well too. ]

(Disclosure: am dog owner)

I found this article somewhat baffling.

At essentially no point does the article consider what the dog's next-best alternative is, or suggest one.  The two most likely answers are 'nonexistence' (for dogs you get from a breeder) or 'prison' (for dogs you get from a shelter).  I'm open to the possibility that some dogs (abused ones, possibly also tiny breeds with genetic breathing problems) have lives worse than nonexistence.  I don't think you can credibly claim most do, and I don't think you can credibly claim that any meaningful proportion of owned dogs have worse lives than they would in shelters. 

The article seems to assume that dogs have a full set of human drives, and are disappointed not to be given the opportunity to write Doggie Shakespeare or something.  I envision the author watching some videos of lions and then saying 'they have no lives beyond waking, eating, and sleeping.  Clearly their life is a misery.'  

The article does an impressive dive into Bulverist psychoanalysis of 'here's why dog owners are evil perverts for having a dog':

'What does it say about a human who enjoys this emotional transaction? It says that on some level they like the idea of having dominance over another being. And, they want that dominance to be a feature of their daily life.' 

On reflection I think the most accurate summary of this article is 'willful outrage-bait'.

Okay, this essay convinced me that dogs can have depression. I also think that dogs probably have real feelings and don't just act the part like this creepy robot child, although I wonder how can one actually test this.

I am not at all convinced, though, that a dog can have preferences, long-term goals, or "a meaningful life". I don't think I've ever seen a dog work on a long-term goal. And if dogs really preferred to take their chances alone in the alien world like the author suggests, a lot more would run away.

A dog's mind is different. Just because I wouldn't enjoy being a pet, doesn't mean a dog doesn't. The author acknowledges this, but still says that "it’s reasonable to say that dogs have some sort of conception of meaning that rises above moment-by-moment pleasures, and that the unfulfillment of this meaning has a negative effect on the happiness of dogs." Well, why do you believe this?