No I’m not a fascist (at least I hope not…)

I’m trying to understand why we’ve normalised the idea of eugenics in dogs (e.g. golden retrievers are friendly and smart, chihuahas are aggressive, etc.)¹ but find the idea of racial classification in humans abhorrent.

I can sort of see it from the idea that Nurture (culture and upbringing) would have a greater effect on a human’s characteristics than Nature would.

At the same time, my family tree has many twins and I’ve noticed that the identical ones have similar outcomes in life, whereas the fraternal ones (even the ones that look very similar) don’t really (N=3).

Maybe dog culture is not a thing, and that’s why people are happy to make these sweeping generalizations on dog characterics?

I’m lost a little

1: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/df/74/f7/df74f716c3a70f59aeb468152e4be927.png

  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    I guess, this confuses me too sometimes since I’ve never owned a pet, but I’ve definitely heard of pet owners refer to their pets as quasi-children.

    While people can and do love their pets very much, I’ve not found the bond with a pet to be anywhere near the same as a bond with my children. At the risk of sounding like a monster, I’d explain it this way:
    My wife and I had a cat die last year after about 17 years with us. We also have kids the oldest of which is not quite a teenager. So, there was some significant overlap and I cried in the vet’s office holding my dead cat for the last time. But, if I had ever been put in a position where I had to choose between protecting one of my children or protecting that cat, there would have been no hesitation in choosing my child over the cat. There was a very strong bond with my cat, but it doesn’t even come close to the bond with my children.

    Maybe this will be different for other people. And yes, we referred to the cat as “our fuzzy kid”. But, when you get right down to it, no he was never at quite the same level.