this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
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mammals are often social creatures, and 'play' is a required activity associated with being social (learning the rules).
i would counter though on the lack of training. you seem to want to treat the pet as you would yourself, but this is not the best way to look at it. you should treat them as your child and i think we all agree that children need guidance to achieve functional adulthood... sometimes rigidly so.
my dog needs to come when called for his safety, not because i demand respect or authority.
Even modern parenting has taken an odd twist as many treat their child as their friend or a toy for their amusement.
I don't think that has never not been a thing... Read memoirs/letters from earlier times and you'll see plenty of it too. The big shift was probably admitting the children don't yearn for the mines, but we seem to be heading back that way (eta: in the USA anyway I won't paint other countries with our fuckery lol).
I agree with you, with the caveat that to the extent that dogs are like children, they can be well-behaved children but they're never going to become adults and so spoiling them doesn't have the same negative consequences that spoiling a human child would.
My dog actually knew a bunch of different commands including "come" that he would obey as part of playtime (he could even walk on his hind legs, which always impressed people) but I don't think he was temperamentally suited to ever being loose around anything dangerous. He would forget everything and start running as fast as he could whenever he saw squirrels and certain other small animals, so it was up to me to tie him securely to my wrist whenever we went outside.
Some people are going to think "this guy doesn't know how to train a dog if he couldn't train his dog not to chase squirrels" but I promise you that I've met other dogs and my dog wasn't like most of them. I'm not saying he was necessarily impossible to train. (How would I know?) However, he was more impulsive than any other dog I've met, including untrained puppies. People would assume he was less than one year old even when he was actually nine.