What have we done to man’s best friend?

We confine them to apartments and our busy schedules– we rationalize it as a better life. We forcefully excise an entire organ system before they have even grown, the vital organ that supplies a mammal’s most important hormones and modulates their growth, vitality, moods and desires– we call this humanity, we claim we “have no choice”. We breed horrific chimaeras of their most interesting and unique features, we find this fun and amusing. We mate them to their own brothers, mothers, sisters, and cousins, we claim this is to preserve their best bloodlines, in a hypocritical imitation of the same eugenic madness that ruined our own royalties. We let ancestral breeds, that have been with us since the first dog ate the first human meal, die on the streets from rabies and distemper, in fights, accidents or in the hands of twisted torturers, and even on people’s plates after a short life of confusion and suffering followed by a horrible death, worse than anything they might have encountered in the wild.

We suddenly respond en masse in a fit of rage to their worst members with mass cullings and vigilante shootings and poisonings of entire regions of happy, friendly, naively trusting dogs, and pretend this isn’t an indelible mark on our souls.

We civilize them out of nature, trick and treat them out of the suspicious, savage instincts and packs that protect them in nature, we made them the only other creatures on earth who will look into our eyes and try to understand what we are feeling, to imitate what they see in us, to want to please and be near us, like children, and then having made them so much like us, we let them loose at night in farms or in forests or roads or tie or confine them in open compounds and broken kennels, with no shelter in the cold night, where they are gored alive by wild animals, their last moments spent cornered, shivering and squealing for your help with a fight they had no hope of winning.

We anthropomorphize them too much on one hand, and anthropomorphize too less on the other, sometimes in the same breath. We inflict on them our moods and abusive patterns, our needs and attachment conflicts, our foods and medical dogmas, our administrative gaffes and political disagreements.

50000 years after our ambitious endeavour to evolve an intelligent partner species, it is time to face up to our true identity: as self-appointed, blundering, sadistic gods.

It is easy to be misanthropic in response to this.
It is also easy to hate dogs or the people who love them and hate yourself if you’re one of them.
It is easy to pretend that dogs are the same as any other animal, when history, experience and common sense scream at your pseudointellectual gymnastics.

It is easy and common because these are the lazy choices. Abstracting non-agency, shame and guilt into hate takes no effort.

Both misanthropy and anthropic nihilism are a coward’s ultimate answer to every human failing.

In truth, time and again, humans have always cared deeply about doing better and living up to our ideals.
Humans have always cared about justice, compassion and competence. Humans have shown an endless capability to change their minds and entire social structures with them.

So, can we, the dog gods, do better? Are we ready to raise our standards? Do we have the sense of responsibility to finish what we started, and do it well?

And if we can’t, do we have the heart and honesty to finally leave them alone, away from us?

I say this with love: if we don’t want to help dogs evolve as a species, we should put them back where we found them and leave them alone. What we’ve done to them, what we’re doing to them in the name of “humane” practices, is unforgivable.

It’s not just specific breed dogs, an artificial and widely-adopted narrow focus.

What happened to choosing the right dog for the right space and lifestyle? To actually helping our oldest and only true cross-species friends in nature co-evolve into the healthiest genetics and widest adaptability to climate, disease and diet? What happened to training based on results and theory of mind, rather than pop science spectacle and power trips, and gatekeeping expertise behind prices most dog owners can never afford?

What happened to actual science? Where is the evidence for the claims and prescriptions that even senior vets trot out as if it is certified gospel?

Let’s take, for example, the issue of neutering, as it offers a great window into examining our morals and beliefs.

We accept the wide-ranging functions played by hormones, so much so that even small changes in the levels can be correlated with psychological and physiological changes corresponding to named disorders, and large changes are able to ameliorate or cause serious dysphoria in humans, to change a person’s life entirely. We see in every species the drastic effects of simply altering hormonal state, let alone removing the sex organs entirely.

But when it comes to dogs, because we must make them convenient to own and exploit for our fun, we are willfully blind to the ethical horror of medically-unnecessary gonadectomy. We propagandize a major surgery as a simple outpatient procedure, borrowing our rhetoric entirely from one country– the US– and none of the others who don’t believe in it.

We allows vets to ridicule concern, empathy and common sense, to levels that in any other medical professional we would consider elitist and classist. We makes jokes about betraying our animals’ trust, where one day they wake up from a drugged slumber without a major sex organ, in pain, feeling very different than they did before.

Do we know or care if they have lifelong complaints they cannot express to us, just as humans do when our sex organs are damaged or removed (and how would we know unless we took the trouble to study this specifically?). Is it not possible that it affects male and female dogs in various specific ways?

Is it not possible, especially in the case of female dogs, that we may be utterly callous in our understanding about the roles the three primary hormones play in their health and wellbeing, as we were till not very long ago even in human medicine.

They wag their tails, eat their food, as is their nature, and we state with confidence, “see, they’re totally fine”.

Do we know if we gave our dogs lifelong malaise or lethargy that they fight with every day? If we ruined their ability to process and enjoy certain foods, and likely to easily gain weight? If we made them more prone to feeling down, or anxious, or aggressive? If we increased their risk of certain tumours and cancers? If we prevented a young, happy, healthy puppy from properly forming certain bones and connective tissue that needed hormonal signals for development?

Did we extend their lifespan by removing their hormones only to make that extended life much less pleasant to live?

We say we care about preserving indigenous street dogs. We say we care about the health and well being of our dogs.

If you neuter every street dog you see, even the *amazing* ones, then the street dogs that somehow manage to breed anyway are likelier to be the ones great at hiding i.e smaller, thinner, more anxious and fearful etc.

.. and be mating with pets abandoned for serious temperament, behaviour and health issues & from puppy mills. That’s the gene pool we’re working with. We talk about the greatness of Indian Street dogs. True! But.. that greatness is already half-gone, and will be lost forever in one generation.

Where will the evolution in dog intelligence or health come from, then?
Where is any notion of responsibility over a life, or the physician’s promise to do no harm, here?

A dog is in heat twice a year, thrice at most, for about 10 days each. Are we so irresponsible, so lazy, such cruel overlords, that we cannot take care to prevent their mating for this tiny fraction of time, and save them a life-altering surgery? That we are incapable of examining and making an informed choice whether the reduced risk of pyometra or a few cancers is a worthy trade-off that needs to be made before a dog has even started its adult life?

Have we become so tired of thinking that we’re incapable of seeing neutering as only a tool, not a divine moral, and therefore making the simple distinctions between the incontrovertible necessity of neutering street dogs vs. the absolute unscientific selfishness of neutering a homed dog vs the unconscionable neglect and ignorance of owners and unreglated breeders who let their female dogs be perpetually pregnant and their male dogs untrained and sexually aggressive in a naturalist fallacy and a proxy for male insecurity?

What happened to vasectomies? Where you can spare every female dog any sort of surgery and focus on the males? Where if you really need to castrate your pet, you can always follow up with that. What happened to research, to find out better methods, to finally improve over veterinary science’s equivalent of human medicine’s early 20th century hubris?

It’s heartening at least to finally see studies coming out questioning the US/UK obsession with full gonadectomy that India has absorbed blindly.

If an animal– a dog, cat, or horse– “needs” to be desexed in order to become a good pet or companion, perhaps we have no right to be making them pets?

If a dog, somewhere, sometime in the future, evolved a rudimentary linguistic and introspective intelligence, would they see our treatment of them as respectful?

The things we do to dogs to contain them are abhorrent– and the necessity/obligation to do those things to them was created by our own half-assed, whimsical dominion over their evolution.

I have 3 dogs, I adore them, and it has only deepened my view, and my dislike and disapproval of “pet ownership” as a whole.

We’re winning the battle on dog overpopulation and losing the war of why we cared enough to wage it in the first place. If we’re no longer interested in this 20000 year cospecies project, then be clear headed/intellectually honest:

Everything we’re doing is eradication, not kindness, love, friendship, ambition or science.