Whenever I stay home sick it is my dog’s responsibility to take care of me. Both of my parents work during the day so when my sisters or I are sick, we are all alone. The only type of dog my family has ever owned are English bulldogs. My first bulldog, buddy, lived to be ten years old. My current bulldog, Pearl, is almost two years old. I stayed home from school yesterday because I was sick. As usual my dog laid with me the entire day to make sure I was okay. I was playing with my dog and thinking a lot about her. Bulldogs are fat, short, and have a terrible respiratory system. Of all dog species they have one of the shortest life expectancies. I was thinking about how a bulldog would act in the wild. Where would they live? What would they eat? How would they survive? I couldn’t answer any of these questions. I could only see these dogs as pets. I do not think they could survive on their own in the wild. Then I started to think about all house pets. Could they survive without being dependent on humans? What is the concept of a pet? Why do we have animals living in our houses among us? Is it right to own another being? Is it right to make these animals dependent on us? I love my pet, but I am questioning whether owning a pet is right. We have taken wild animals and domesticated them. All house pets are like broken horses, forced to obey and act against their nature. Did we make a mistake when we started to own pets?
I'm not positive if this is one of your book blogs but I'm just going to assume it is. When it comes to pets like birds or snakes that really are meant to be in the wild, I think it's a little bit cruel to force them to live in a house. As for pets like dogs, they were domesticated as a result of wolves' actions. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail but dogs came into existence because some evolved wolves were able to help humans and the humans were able to help the evolved wolves, so both benefitted from the relationship (which eventually produced modern dogs). With dogs I think it's right to keep them as pets because they evolved to fit a domestic environment. As for your bulldog, that would definitely not survive in the wild. Bulldogs were bred to have abnormally large heads, and bulldogs can only be born through a C-section because their heads are too big to go through natural birth. They would not be able to be born naturally in the wild. Do you think there's a difference between pets like dogs that evolved partially on their own to fit a domestic environment and pets like horses or snakes that could still live in the wild?
ReplyDeleteThis actually is not one of my book posts but it does relate. The information about wolves was extremely interesting to me. I had never heard that before. My question for you would be was it evolution that made these evolved wolves domesticated enough to help us? Did they become this way so that we would be able to keep them alive? Or did they evolve this way from human interaction. For example humans may have tried to use wolves for labor and the ones that were most domesticated lived longer because humans were using them, so they were investing in their life. Did we cause an evolutionary patter do did it happen naturally? Would the more evolved wolves be able to live without humans? To answer your final question I do not know where I stand. Our world has changed so much that I don’t know if the more exotic pets would survive in the wild because their habitat has drastically changed. There are not many wild horses found in the world. I would be interested on how they survive with the current status of the world.
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