- face cleaner
- cheese stealer
- exercise inducer
- hair factory
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ooh I forgot āarmpit snorterā. He likes to stick his nose in there and then snort really loudly. I assume heās figured thatās the polite human equivalent of a butt-sniff.
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Our dog intensely dislikes one of the postal delivery women (they are currently all women in our area) but tries to impress the (young, attractive) one with his good behaviour. I find this a bit worrying, though I suspect (but havenāt dared ask) that the one he particularly dislikes must have a male German Shepherd, a breed he also detests.
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I wonāt be living in a world without cats who live in my house.
And, unless they go extinct, I donāt see how a population of feral cats, or feral dogs, is better than a population of individuals who live with people. My cats are free to leave whenever they want to, but they keep asking to come back inside and cuddle with us.
Actually, this one is trapped in the house for a couple of months yet. Seems to be doing OK, though.
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One of our cats has a thing for stinky shoes. The stinkier the better. He just sticks his big head in and sniiiiiiiiifffs. Then he plays with the shoe, with his head still inside.
As for servantsā¦ We humans are the servants at our house. Need to go pee when you wake up? Too bad, cats insist on food first. If you donāt feed them, you get a lecture at high volume until you do. Litter box dirty? Expect dirty looks from two of them and the last one meowing pathetically every single time you get within 5 feet of the dirty boxes.
One of them has even figured out how to make my phone move to the next page when Iām reading a book and he wants me to pet him.
I do love them thoughā¦
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Thereās a growing movement against zoos, and while many zoos are expanding their habitats, limiting what species they will keep or display and engaging/participating in zoological research & study, it will never be enough.
That said, a competent zoo with caring professionals keeping animals foremost for rehabilitation, breeding programs and research to benefit the wild world is a shit-ton better than Joe Average keeping a large snake in his apartment. Even if Joe bothers to educate themselves about how to best care for a wild animal, they must then ignore the over-arching theme such an education would reveal. That theme being, you canāt and you shouldnāt keep wild animals as pets.
You make a good point regarding emotional age and pet ownership, but particularly exotic pet ownership. To this day I have yet to meet or communicate with someone who keeps such creatures as pets that isnāt clearly under-developed in some fundamental way. I feel bad for them but they need an appropriate security blanket that doesnāt further an industry that harms to feed their need.
People with domesticated animals run the gamut of emotional development in relation to their pets in my experience. Demonstrated by a range beginning with treating their animals as infant humans, various imposed anthropomorphic identities/relationships and ending at the other side with people that treat the domestic animal as a domestic animal (treating them as what the are doesnāt exclude the āpetā nature of the relationship).
Note: Every person has a blind spot. I believe there are people who buy wild animals because they get a wild hair up their ass and donāt consider it first, it doesnāt by necessity mean all persons with exotic animals are as I have experienced. It is for me a huge, huge red flag though.
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The head of PETA has a solution for that. She thinks that when we die, we should be cooked and eaten. She has made arrangements for this to happen to her. Did I mention sheās batshit crazy?
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Soylent Green is PETA!
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That isnāt a solution. We donāt die fast enough to feed peopleā¦
What an indecent proposal!
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Also given the average life expectancy and life style of people the meat will either be too gamey or of very low quality. Though given vegans subsist of diet dominated by cereals their meat might actually be quite tender like grain feed cattle.
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Does this mean we are all going to be killed off while weāre still healthy and fit for consumption? Too late in my case. I obviously need to make PETA a modest proposal which will solve all our problems in about 85 years.
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Sacrifices will have to be made for the betterment of all.
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If tiās wrong for individual families to own exotic animals, is it somehow less wrong for Zoos to own them?
Zoos are supposed to have professionals trained in the care of exotic animals and generally work towards conservation of various species. Many have breeding initiatives for endangered species.
Pet owners just want something cute and alive hanging around. Plus the majority of pets are not exotic animals by any stretch of the imagination. Dogs, cats and rodents are not only common, but in the wild can be considered pests or vermin.
I am not a big fan of exotic pets. Its usually a recipe for introducing invasive species to a given place.
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This is why organic free range human farming is a waste of time. They need to be penned in and pampered like Kobe beef.
Give them a couch, unlimited Netflix and a steady supply of fast food and you will see people volunteering for the farm.
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Mine has found new and interesting ways to train me. To be sure I am awake for his feeding (always 1 hour before I intend to get up on any given day) he has learned that remote controls skittering across the hardwood floor gets a reaction from me as well as knocking anything off a counter.
To quote Terry Crews in Brooklyn Nine Nine, āCats are dicks, they would kill us all if they learned how to use weaponsā
But the little fuzzball is still so adorable and friendly around people.
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Yet donāt really do much in way of actual rehab on anything they release. Just oh hey live free. Free I tell you! Fr- Oh well better free than a slave. Donations plz.
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Iām going to agree that a lot of people who keep pets, shouldnāt. People keep inappropriate animals or ones that cause serious ecological harm [felis catus]. I would like to see much more regulation of dog ownership.
But there are arguments in favour of pet keeping - such as teaching children to care for things that cannot easily state their needs, and encouraging conservation.They are not negligible.
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If that isnāt already a sci-fi story, it should be.
Guarantee a child 20 years of pampered comfort and luxury in exchange they will be the center of a feast.
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I agree that pet ownership has merits and am in favor of it. Just not exotic pets.
Not just because of environmental concerns but the acquisition of some have some very unsavory elements to them (especially some tropical fish, reptiles, primates and birds).
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Well Hollywood already did a story about a human breeding farm, except it wasnāt science fiction, it was historical.
Then again come to think of it, human farms was the premise of Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. Slavery was as much for an easy food source of vampires as it was for unpaid labor.
