Dog lovers aren’t animal lovers

[Namechanger1993]

I’ve been lurking in various dog related threads recently and it’s become abundantly clear how few dog owners on MN actually love animals. Not all. But lots.

Posters not caring about health tests on parents, or the breeders experience or ability or what happens to the bitch (mother of the pups) after as their desire for expensive mix outweighs their ethics about puppy farming or dogs being born in pain with chronic health issues as a result of bad breeding. Posters admitting their dogs have soiled themselves for a year before they put their dog to sleep. No matter which way you look at it (and believe me, I understand how hard it is to say goodbye), people who love their dogs don’t let them sleep in their shit for a year. Posters not exercising their dog sufficiently or not giving it mental stimulation and then wondering why its badly behaved.

Time and time again I’ve seen posters put their desire for a dog above any morals they might have about animal welfare (including their own dogs). welfare. Honestly, it’s quite shocking how little so many posters care about their dogs, or indeed the dogs use to produce their cute puppy.

Thanks. She has just come in from the garden after baking herself. Will cool down and go out to do it again 😆

I am not coming at you @YeOldeGreyhound but you keep insisting that I say things that I do not say. Please stop that.

I am not trying to upset anyone @tumblingdowntherabbithole and I have never said I know best!

But if we see an animal who is suffering, I think we have a duty to see if we can help. I've only said something a few of times. I try to be diplomatic, open up a conversation... some people are defensive but others have been grateful that someone is helping them face up to things. I would be glad if someone said something to me if they noticed anything. We can all miss things especially when we see our dogs every day and the decline is gradual.

Puppy farmers provide these too, if they KC reg their puppies. KC registration and a generational pedigree does not mean the breeder is reputable.

Should we automatically start euthanising people as soon as they get old and poo the bed?

I've currently got 2 cats and 2 dogs plus snakes, fish, a tortoise and a bird.

I also follow Galgos de Sol on Facebook. I adopted two dogs from Spain - not galgos though; a Brittany and a Pointer.

Never met them until they turned up in the van either.

Because they take Vitamin B12 supplements and have to watch their diets very carefully.

You also said,
How about we invest in technology to develop a better alternative. Imagine how far we'd have come if we hadn't ploughed all that money into dogs.
'Better' by whose metric? Working dogs love what they do, or they wouldn't be doing it with such enthusiasm.
And what machinery do you propose to replace the adaptability of, say, a guide dog who can work on a vast range of surfaces, up and down steps, over rough ground and so on.
A LOT of money has been ploughed into AI. And yet, armies and police forces and so on still rely on canine olfaction to find explosives, drugs and so on.

You've totally missed the point, which is this: A lot of these so-called "rescue" dogs being imported are in fact from puppy farms. And a lot of people who take on these "street dogs" are not doing enough research and have no idea what they are getting. And a lot of the time it ends in tears.

@LadyTangerine
I agree on the exercise; there are far too many fair weather dog walkers these days. Or people who just stand and fling a ball down the garden for 5 minutes and that's it for the day.

When it's cool and showery, if we go onto the local meadow we can have the whole big field to ourselves. Go at the same time on a warm, sunny day and we'll count 15-20 dogs.

I'm a vegetarian, but from what I see of friends who are vegan, they don't eat nearly as well as I do. My diet is focused on fresh fruit and vegetables but they seem to eat more soya, mushrooms and what I term fake meat but put less emphasis on actual veg...

We have a 6 year old Staffy. Found him on pets4homes. Committed the ultimate sin of not even seeing his parents. 😱. We went to meet him in a horrible pub and it was obvious he had a belly full of worms. We know we should’ve walked away but we couldn’t. We just wanted to get him out of there.
Without insurance he would’ve bankrupted us due to having a bulging disc.
He’s a much loved member of our family and the vet said he was very lucky to have us as his owners as we seem so in tune with him and we meet his needs exceptionally well.
So, we may have a dog with issues that we probably( definitely) shouldn’t have bought but he could’ve ended up with owners that would’ve given up on him.
We tried to rescue first but they wouldn’t entertain us because we both work.

Our beagle buries himself under a blanket, toasts himself, then lies on the floor panting like someone forced him under there 😂

I just like to think most owners are doing their best and don't need a stranger to butt in and give them unwanted advice about their dogs' health and well-being.

My beagle often limps dramatically when he gets grass on his paws - if someone told me they thought he was suffering because of a tiny snapshot I would think they were bonkers - but I'd also be pretty offended that they thought I was stupid enough to walk a suffering dog in the first place.

I think pet ownership will become less sociably acceptable and eventually die out. I hope so at least. But I think it will take a long long time yet.

@redboxer321

Given that dogs have lived and worked alongside humans for thousands of years, I am curious about this.
Do you include working dogs? Many of which do live as pets in the home. And if not, then how does man cope without sheepdogs, sniffer dogs, guide dogs etc that play an important role in society?
If these dogs are exempt from the rules of your pet free utopia, then who determines which dogs are allowed to exist alongside handlers and which are not?

@CoubousAndTourmalet - another poster upthread said that we should use technology instead of working dogs. Not quite sure how that would work on a fell in the arsehole of nowhere

But that means one is offering ONE animal a better life AT A COST to hundreds of others that will be bred and then slaughtered, merely to feed that pet. It is just so short-sighted. And no, much meat for pet food is not merely offcuts from the meat-for-humans industry.
How would people feel if instead of breeding chickens, fish, pigs, sheep, cows, and using them to feed dogs, cats and zoo animals, we just stop breeding the farmed animals, and feed the surplus dogs and cats to the zoo animals. I mean, WHY do we find it more palatable to be so ok with goats and chickens being fed to the lions, than dogs and cats? As a vegan, I am obviously against zoos too, but I am making a point. By saving cats and dogs, innumerable other animals are caused immense suffering.

Yanbu. I don't particularly like dogs but became a dog owner accidentally outside a shopping centre, 3 years ago, a homeless man held a tiny pup with a swollen stomach full of worms, flea bites around the fur on her eyes, cost me €100 and a €250 vet bill.
She has become part of the family and won't be breed. The thought of her pups out there, she has not a popular breed anyway.

I'd reverse that thinking. We CAN eat meat, but we don't have to. We are designed to be able to eat it if we absolutely have to. But we don't.

I can assure you that most vegans do not look bloody ill.

Images need preapproval so I'll post links instead:

https://www.businessinsider.com/vegan-bodybuilder-how-to-build-muscle-on-plant-based-diet-2020-10

https://www.livekindly.com/actor-joaquin-phoenix-reveals-the-moment-that-made-him-go-vegan-40-years-ago/

https://www.livekindly.com/how-woody-harrelson-became-vegan-icon/

https://vegangreenplanet.com/vegan-athletes-with-gains-the-animals-and-planet/

I am not lecturing anyone. I am providing information. The fact you feel lectured at means you feel on some level that you are wrong.

I don't think we should breed any animals. I think we should let nature take care of itself. Dogs are an unnatural species, created by humans, and I believe we should absolutely stop breeding them. Technology is here and will take over for the drug-sniffers, the seeing-eye dogs etc. For the dogs that re already here, I don't see the difference in feeding them to obligate carnivores like lions, who are going to be eating other poor animals like goats and sheep - why not dogs?! Food for thought, eh!

Okay, so in your idealistic world with no animals being bred, what happens to all the existing ones? Just release them into the wild to go feral? Sterilise them? Kill them?

In my utopian world, we wouldn't have sheepdogs because we wouldn't have sheep harmers, sorry, sheep farmers, breeding and using and killing sheep. Therefore we wouldn't need dogs to go out herding sheep.

So again, what happens to all the existing animals? Just kill them? Set them free to live natural lives? Sterilise them?

And then what happens to the farmland and the fells where sheep and other animals exist purely to control the landscape? Just let it go wild and become unusable?

Just stop breeding them. Easy. Nature will balance itself in the countryside. Humans must stop interfering. I am all for us trying to reverse the damage we have done to certain species, in the wilds of Africa etc, but here in the UK, we can just stop breeding farmed animals, stop breeding pets, and focus on enjoying wildlife and one another. I actually do enjoy the beauty of cats, but they are devastating to the environment. I would much rather see more wildlife. It would be better for the planet.

If the sheep and other animals exist "to control the landscape" then let them be, let them do just that. Let's just not go in and cart them off to the slaughterhouse.

I've already answered about the other animals.

If they’re feeding their dog meat then they’re clearly not animal lovers!

It’s estimated that 6 billion animals are slaughtered every year for dog food 😭

You haven't really answered, apart from to say to feed them to lions.

Take away human interference and you will end up with either lots of extinct species, or lots of land completely taken over and becoming unusable for farming all the vegetables and crops we should apparently eating