I never said you can gauge the emotions of pets. It's the same with another person, unless you share an extremely good connection with each other, opinions, etc, you can't really gauge their emotions easily, if at all. However, I believe properly raised pets can and will show those "truly ungaugable" emotions you speak of.
Was my parrot biting everyone he could was me being a bad owner? Might be, but some sources say that it's how much of "education" they got during their chickhood. Also, I can't say I could know what my parrot feels all the time, but I know for certain that he felt safe on my shoulder, considering the moment he got on my finger he rushed to my shoulder, and climbed even if I put something in his way. When his wings fully grew, he tended to fly for my shoulder often too.
That could be said exactly for humans. Wouldn't you prefer living in one place where everything's served to you? You get everything you need easily. Wouldn't you prefer to stay there than a place you have to, say, struggle / fight for your food?
Those bears were example of animal abuse. You know what drug dealers are made off; fortune looking *******s, and no regard to others as long as their butt is okay.
Wild animals are wild animals, they do not equal animals that was taken care of by humans from a little amount of time after birth. Take a wild animals and put it in a cage, it might get used to it, but will suffer endlessly. It will not be friendly to humans at all. Take a human raised one, easier to contact with, and they even consider the cage to be their home.
Not feeding them.. is.. I don't know, really. Some people just throw them out of generousity, and I've yet to hear someone say it's a bad thing to feed wild animals. Maybe if school kicked out some history lessons (too bad for you history lovers, I don't care what happened in the past, not in the long run at least, and most things I learned was past things that have little affect currently and nobody really gives a sheep about them.) and use that time to teach us about the current, and treating wild animals as wild animals might have helped. Or cut literary classes. I'm getting a bit offtopic though, but it would be great if we'd have some animals / other subjects education even if it was minimal instead of our teacher saying how bad we act etc etc etc.
Explain me what domestication is. And what do you mean by chimereas breeds? Also, I cannot participate in a cat/dog argument since I never liked them. I prefer birds.
And as for the chickens, we all know how they feed them. Make them big and fatty, if I remember correctly.
Also, if you're another of those animals free in nature crap people bought up, I hate this. I don't see any bad living alongside animals in harmony. Not harmony, but a certain connection, I find it lovely.
I'll guess I'll address this by paragraph...
1. Well, this was my point to begin with. Though, even poorly raised pets can't be gauged because
animals cannot communicate verbally with humans.
2. Biting is most likely an instinctual adaptation. Birds, being such relatively hard to train animals, are less likely to grow out of their instincts. Though perhaps taking an animal out of its instinctual realm is inhumane in and of itself. Then, it grows to be a problem that those who teach their pets to be "good" in terms of human are actually stripping animals of what makes them animals. Besides, animals never attack out of malice (since malice is very much a byproduct of humanistic want), so you can't really consider bestial bellicosity as an inherently "bad" thing, but something "bad" to humans.
And about the shoulder thing, not to devalue your friendship, but birds... Do that to trees too.
3.
The problem does not arise from finding a place where food is given to you, but from having an unreliable food source. Sure, if the same old man comes to the park every day and throws a loaf of bread on the floor, then that is great. However, most animal feeders only toss out food on a whim, without obligations, and are therefore unreliable food sources -- who knows if they'll be there tomorrow or not.
4. The bear-tamers being marijuana planters is irrelevant to my point. If I had neglected to mention that point, then you would have deemed it less severe. The point is that feeding animals is bad because it strips them of their ability to survive by habituating them to free service. The bears were added as a point because they, being wild animals, should definitely not be docile in the wild. Now, after having been tamed, they have basically forgotten how to defend themselves or hunt.
5. Perhaps the fundamental problem here is:
what gives the human rights to raise the animal at all? And, I have never once met an animal that preferred its cage over the outside world (though, I have met one very sweet dog that was afraid to go indoors).
6. Skipping over this one because it's irrelevant elephant.
7. Domestication is the assimilation of a species of animals into the human realm. Domestication is the single most influential method of artificial selection humankind has imposed on the animal world (rather than let natural selection take its course, we selectively breed certain individuals and prevent others from having children in order to have offspring with certain traits).
Chimera breeds are those that arise from breeding two different breeds of any species. For example, a chihuahua mixed with any large-sized dog will make its offspring dwarved. Sure, cute, but also rather evolutionarily useless and cruel (the dog is stuck that way for the rest of its life). Bird point is moot because we have chimera birds too. Another problem lies in the fact that breeders only breed for aesthetics and the pursuit of making a breed that will
generate a good amount of money (sound familiar?).
I'm not sure how I feel about this, though. We have bred a lot of animals in the past, and while some benefit humans greatly, others are pretty idiotic. For example, bulls now have much larger flanks than they did in the past because we stopped bulls that had small flanks from breeding. We get more meat. On the other hand, we've also created the monstrosity known as the Japanese hornet, the most ferocious species of hornet yet, going out of its way to harm anything that even dares move in its environment.
8. Problem isn't with how we feed them, it's with the homes we raise them in. Maybe the image of pleasant farms with animals roaming in meadows is still ingrained in our heads, but almost all of the world's large farms today look like this:
9. I can admit that there is a certain natural kinship between humans and animals, and that animals can be friends across species (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4OD8dxIry8), however, I feel that having pets around falls far from symbiosis and boils down to solely personal gain (read this:)
most of the time.