According to an abolitionist: yes all domesticated animals are slaves.
http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/pets-the-inherent-problems-of-domestication/#.Vpk6l8tMHqA
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Thank you @Mister_Eppy and @popobawa4u for moving this discussion out of my new favorite thread.
In the US and many other countries humans restrict the rights of some people due to severe mental disability and make them wards of the state. Are mental patients also slaves?
We also restrict the rights of children and assign a kind of parental ownership on parents. Are children also slaves?
Is there any point where an ethical framework for labeling entities as slaves could reach the point of absurdity where youâd decide to update the terms of the ethical framework?
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I agree with some points, but not this:
We regard the dogs who live with us as refugees of sorts, and although we enjoy caring for them, it is clear that humans have no business continuing to bring these creatures into a world in which they simply do not fit.
How do dogs not fit? They tend to be at least as survivable and resourceful in many environments as humans are.
I think that the real problem is the human arrogance that dogs canât and shouldnât survive without human domestication. Unfortunately, I think that Professor Francione, the author, falls into this same trap from the other side. The deeper problem is that human governments are devised to be segregated from the rest of all life, which is really untenable. It has appeared to work for so long because the human population was much smaller, and we still had something like a robust biosphere around our centers of population.
The apparent difficulty of integrating humans and other species I think is far overstated. The main difficulty is simply that it seems âunthinkableâ to most people. It really amounts to yet another irrational feeling of entitlement, not unlike what manifests in sexism, racism, classism, and other such baseless compulsions. Are you really entitled to live only amongst your own kind? Or does acting this way make your life seem easier at someone elseâs expense?
I think that the ethical option is to accept agency as the norm, rather than presume to grant it by means of some lofty and contrived power. This means that it is civil to let people decide for themselves if they need help. Protecting somebody who does not want your protection is really only helping yourself, not them. But this means accepting that people are ultimately responsible for their own decisions, even quite bad decisions.
This is central to what I think of as âcivilized societyâ, but all of this, unfortunately, runs quite counter to how most societies and governments currently run. The reasons why people seem to require so much protection from each other and themselves is precisely because people are taught from the outset that agency is some abstract, conditional thing which is not equitably applied. This is why people (human or otherwise) are not allowed to truly succeed or fail by their own merits, nor even have goals - personal or collective - which arenât sanctioned by somebody with ârealâ agency.
I agree that it is true that recognizing the agency of disabled, children, and non-humans makes some areas of administrating society more difficult. But I think it also makes other areas easier. It makes government more about facilitating than controlling, which I think is arguably more beneficial. Limiting people to make them easier to control seems to me to ultimately only improve life for the administrators. It creates an elite and gives them something to do.
I think it is very telling that - in the US, at least - there is no formal way for individuals to accept liability for doing something which may be foolish, unpopular, or unsafe. Because, like any other domesticated animal, you are considered by people who matter more than you do to be somebody elseâs responsibility. It can be a self-perpetuating system, but if one doesnât agree with its precepts, there doesnât seem to be much to it.
Would give new meaning to âcongress crittersâ
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Hmph. Discrimination.
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But donât dogs owe their existence to human domestication? You can say theyâre free to go on and fend for themselves, and they do. But their inclination to live with humans isnât just a weird affectation some dogs choose to indulge in.
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Well, kinda; but stray dogs does exist and were technically the same species as wolves and coyotes.
Theyâre the same genus, but domesticated dogs are canis canis (which can also be feral), while wolves are canis lupus (with some subspecies), and coyotes are canis latrans. Common ancestor, but new species now.
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Mine sure as hell was!
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Mine are as well. And so was I.
Is this not the natural order?
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Well, if she wants me to pay for college, which I amâŚ
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See! We really donât want cats passing legislation! (or dreaming together) 
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Holy crap you guys! These Moroccan falcons arenât pets, but they keep other birds held as prisoners for a while (and clip their tails so they canât fly off) before feeding them to their chicks. That almost feels like a bird holding another bird as a slave. (Assuming the articleâs accurate, and given that slavery is a human concept - natural phenomena do not apply, etc., but stillâŚ)
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Come on, man⌠surely itâs not completely bonkers to consider the term âpet ownerâ bad language in a sense. It just takes the ability to step outside our self-important navel-gazing perspective* and collective sociopathy towards the biosphere.
*wherein, paradoxically enough, âthe economyâ is regarded as something that defines us rather than the other way aroundâŚ
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You sometimes run into a construction in Elizabethan (and other archaic) English that looks like a transitional form (it shows where the âsâ in âxâs somethingâ might come from).
For example, âthe count his galleysâ (âthe Countâs galleysâ) and (I think) âthe countyâs manâ (âthe Countâs manâ).
I scanned through the thread. Years ago as a philosophy major I took an advanced course in environmental ethics. The term you want to look into for this conversation is âanimal rights.â There are people who want to extend the rights we have as people to animals.
I, personally, found the arguments for a rights-based ethics for animals just hard to swallow. The conclusions of this premise just went to some weird places.
One of the issues I had in general with conversations about animals, particularly farm animals, and rights is that all farm animals have been bred through animal husbandry to be dependent upon us humans. If we were all to become vegetarians and Free the Cows! itâs not like they be able to survive without us.
Likewise, cats and dogs can forage for themselves but if you look at what happens to feral cat communities, itâs hard to see it as a loving act to return Fluffy to the wild.
However, I do think that thinking about animals as having agency makes us think about things like appropriating land animals habitate on and how can we approach it as sharing that land or at least considering that they have a ârightâ to it as much as well in order to make some better choices that include their needs, instead of (literally) bulldozing over them.
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âŚbut Iâd watch that cspan feed if they tried.
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But no one (other than maybe PETA; thus, no one worth listening to) is arguing that all farm animals and pets should be let out into the woods tomorrow at 9:00am.
We are currently going out of our way to breed as many of these animals for our use as we can. Cows, for example, are kept in a constant state of pregnancy so that they can be milked as close to 365 days a year as possible, with the resulting calves being used for veal or given a very short time to be grown for beef or dairy production.
There is middle ground here, which is never considered. This is another one of those subjects, like guns, that seem to allow for only one extreme or the other, despite the fact that everyone would be better served by an intelligent compromise.
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