beanytuesday
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Two Friends Discuss Dogs
🕑 Added 2021-03-22 23:10:25 +0000 UTCEveryone: Pugs are so cute!
Originally, I went into the research of this comic with the exact hunch of tall friend; humans are so unrelentingly and nonchalantly cruel to animals in so many aspects of life, surely that same attitude extends into the realms of pets, no? Well, as it turns out... not totally! The thing that immediately struck me is how powerful the attachment between man and dog is post-socialization; dogs actually crave human interaction much more than the interaction of other dogs! Of course, similar things can be sort of said about any animals that are brought up totally isolated from other animals; you get used to the situation you grow up in. That being said, dogs are actively evolutionary adapted to such living arrangements, and suffer a far worse quality of life when feralized (ie fearful of humans-- not exactly the same as "stray") failing to even be reproductively self-sustaining...
Anyhoo, its actually a pretty fascinating area of research, animal behavior and bioethics intersecting quite a bit. I won't ramble on about it endlessly, though it is important that I stress that despite what I say in the comic, there is still quite a lot that is probably bad about the way we keep dogs as pets. (Spending so much time indoors, for one, seems definitely NOT ideal; dogs didn't evolve for that, remember? But again, measuring an animal's happiness is quite difficult, and I haven't looked at the research for that particular topic.)
That list of Pug diseases? The first five are all real. Prolapsed eyeballs! Christ! Is it worth it just to get a dog that looks frying-pan-to-the-faced Tom and Jerry character?
Comments
Beany Tuesday
yep
Is there a monkey refilling his antidepressants in the final panel?
Martynas Klimas
Yeah, getting a 2nd cat to keep the company for the first one (and to have two cats, which is its own reward) ain't easy. The best odds is having an adult cat and bringing in a kitten, but it's just that: best odds. I have a sedentary older cat and a very active younger cat. The youngling keeps challenging the older one, but the older one is too stupid to understand what's happening, and so they fight, and I have to get the spray bottle. When my mom's around, she definitely reacts to the cat fight like the cat owner panel lol. Also, never heard this about dogs, but cats really did domesticate themselves twice on the basis "fuck, that granary is fucking swollen with rodents, I could make a killing in there," and cats we have today are the descendants of ones that found humans most tolerable (or, in my older cat's case, developed a pathological need for human attention).
The cat panel would be funny on its own but it's better as a part of this series
manton minnick
So fucking good. My favorite series
