On dogs, pets and the possibility of stepping on too many of my friends' toes

OKAY, so apparently a dog died in a Cebu Pacific flight and I read about it in this blog.  You can read it first before proceeding further.

Now, I'd like to make it clear that what Cebu Pacific did was downright wrong and should be condemned, but I'd also add that the owner of that dog is not getting any sympathy from me.  I'm more inclined to feel sorry for the dog itself. But if it ever had a soul, then it's probably in a better place now so I won't bother anymore.

The blog's a tearjerker, for sure.  And we'd all love to crucify Cebu Pacific whose mishandling of the dog effectively caused its death.  But I'm blaming the dog owner too.  Let me explain:

I don't travel a lot, and my last plane ride was in 1997.  But even I am aware of Cebu Pacific's atrocious reputation as an airline.  For people who seem to be well-traveled, the dog owner and her companion seem to disregard this in their haste to get the dog transported.

Much of the blog was also spent discussing the emotional closeness of the owner with the dog.  (They tend to call this "love".)  Now, if the pet owner really loved her pet, then she would not have brought her along that Cebu Pacific flight, especially when she claimed to have some some sort of prescient misapprehensions about leaving the dog in the cargo area. 

(You see, anybody who can afford to pamper a pet and transport it from abroad with full documentation can surely afford to lose a Philippine domestic airline seat if he/she is not confident about how the pet will be treated.  But no, she had to take the flight.  That's love for you.)

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For me, what all this is a symptom of modern society's seeming confusion on how to treat animals especially pets, and especially dogs.  We're all so caught up in animal rights, yet we've made it possible to breed dogs that have become so dependent on us humans that they would not be able to function on their own. 

Take the pug, for example.  I could think of no worse victim of man's attempts at genetic engineering than this pathetic breed.  It's snout is nonexistent, the legs too short and it's body too rounded, and it's only slightly bigger than the average house cat.  It doesn't run very fast, it can't hunt (not with a snout like that) and its bark is more annoying than threatening. Apparently its only reason for existence is because some people find it cute.

"Personally, I think I prefer natural selection."

Whereas before, humanity has amply fulfilled its role as nature's steward by harnessing the dog's natural capabilities (i.e. hunting), throughout the centuries we decided to play petty-God and forcibly bred and crossbred dogs until we came to the point of turning the descendant of the magnificent Canis Lupus into nothing more than furry playthings.  The pug being a case in point.

So here we are humans fighting for what we believe are animal rights not realizing that at least part of what we are really fighting for is the convenience of treating animals as property that we can tug along anywhere.  For example, we've lobbied for business establishments to be "pet friendly".  But have we asked ourselves why the hell would a dog want to go to a mall, a salon or travel by airplane?  No, it's us who want to go to those places, and we delude ourselves into thinking that our pets want to go there too.

In a larger sense, here's what's going on:  We keep our pets alive just because they please or amuse us, and not out of a genuine sense of love for living things.  We try to confine their existence to our personal space and try to snuff out whatever ember that remains of their true nature. We then set unrealistic expectations that everybody else should make allowances for us just because we think this way.

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I have pets too.  I happen to own a number of cats.  Well, that's not true.  I feed them and take care of them if I can, but cats pretty much go their own way so I can't really say that I "own" them.  And this is perhaps the reason why I prefer taking care of cats.  It's so much easier to allow them to retain their natural ways.  With the exception of pigeons, cats can go to places and naturally interact with members of their own species in a way that no other domesticated animals can.  The average house cat is still very much capable of looking for it's own food, so it's no big deal if I don't feed them 3 or 4 out of 7 days in the week.

I like dogs too.  But until I'm in a position to be able to adequately take care of one, I would not even dream of owning one.  In the world today, there are hundreds of thousands of first-time pet owners who have an astonishingly limited idea of exactly what their pets are and what it entails to take care of them.  Before purchasing pets and screaming for animal rights, I wish that we spent more time treating them as living things belonging to a particular species, than treating them merely as movable property.