@Sarov Interesting question, but I think "being a pet" needs to be clarified. It sure wouldn't be unethical to feed them and play and cuddle with them. Other aspects of "being a pet" might be ethically questionable
When I was a baby it was ethical to put small children on a leash with a harness that looked like a backpack (without the bag). It was to keep them close and protect them from harm like running onto a road. Extremely comparable to pets...
Well yeah. I was thinking more, like, a particular offshoot of (say) dogs mutates to become, while not as intelligent as us, self-aware enough to realize pet=slave.
Alternately, flip it around - a particular strand of humans mutates to be as much smarter than us as we are to dogs - is it ethical for them to keep us as pets? Same question, imo.
@Sarov Aren't we already in a state of servitude to the social and economical environment we created? I'm forced to work to be able to eat and live in a house...
Then I'll draw a very uncomfortable line to uneducated workers in the very poor areas of the world. These people aren't stupid, but they lack the education to chose a highly paid job. And they are either forgotten by the western world or exploited in a way I would call unethical
Sure, but in those two cases it's a question of opportunity, not ability. I'm considering a hypothetical where we have an offshoot that's legitimately, like, IQ ~400 or something.
I once heard something about westerners working in Japan being kept as "office pets". They don't have any work to do and are just hired to look good and impress guests with how international the company is. But I cannot find any reference now... might have been a misconception
But considering the Japanese work culture, it may actually be beneficial to earn your money for being a "pet". So as long as people volunteer, it seems to be ethical enough
Depends what options are allowed/available to alleviate that boredom.
Being paid to sit at a desk behind a glass wall, doing nothing but smiling, with no computer, being watched so I can't read a book or something? You'd have to pay me **a lot**.
@BrittneyReynolds I have no experience with fish eggs, but I know that the eggs of my snail are clear and translucent (he/she is the only one snail so the eggs are unfertilized) and they turn opaque as they decay later. I know that fertilized eggs of those snails are also clear and translucent, but with little embroys visible inside; summing up, I'd look for those platy eggs and attempt to assess whether they turn progressively more opaque or not. If they don't that means they are alive.
@Sarov Hahahaha I must admit that I don't know, I do not want to pose as a snail expert because it is complicated and some snails both male and female at the same time (but still require second snail to reproduce), some are divided into he or she; it depends on whether they are land, aquatic freshwater or aquatic marine snails...
...and I do not know any more details than this, but you made me curious as well and I see that Wikipedia says: "Gastropods are capable of being either male or female, or hermaphrodites, and this makes their reproduction system unique amongst many other invertebrates."
No it's not trigender, some snails are clearly divided into male and female species, while other snails are both male and female at the same time (they have both reproductive organs), but I do not exactly know how it works because within those species some could "switch" between which organ is active and the other one is dormant, but I don't know whether it is all or just some of them. And yes it is different mainly in respect to their habitat, because fertilization works different on...
By the way, I am learning almost all of this in real time now, together with you, I did not know most of this before, I am reading Wikipedia and other articles. Haha maybe they are weird, but they are primitive invertebrates after all; I appreciate my aquarium snail because it has been the only one animal that is incapable of making me a sad surprise and jumping out of the aquarium :D
That's annoying. I generally prefer to use multiline posts instead of posting multiple times. So that I can split ideas without flooding the chat with message notifications.
Oh I also prefer to type into single message, but I had always had anxiety that someone may not click "read more", and one day (a few months ago or so) one person asked me some questions that were already answered in later part of my chat message and then the person said something like "oh okay I see, I see, I just didn't click "read more"" :(
@Sarov Hahahaha you would be a good snail escape artist coach :D that is actually what he/she/it sometimes tries to do, but usually the snail immediately turns 90 to 180 degrees once it reaches the water surface, like it is unpleasant to the snail I guess. But yes, on rare occassions I have seen this snail to go a little bit outside, but never too much...
...and usually at most 1/4 to 1/2 body length gets outside of the water. One time, however, the snail went more than a full body length outside, and I do not exactly remember but the distance between water surface and the closest point of snail's body was 1 or 2 mm; the snail then curled inside the shell in the most part, only leaving what it was required to stay attached to the glass, and after a few hours went back to water.
But I know there are snails called nerite snails, common for freshwater tanks, and they absolutely require a top of aquarium to be covered because they could walk completely outiside, like not only from inner walls, but walk all the distance of outer walls as well and then completely escape aquarium; I guess once they leave inner walls they just get lost and cannot return home.
Haha yes it is weird and I also wonder about this, but one surprising thing I learnt was that not all aquatic snails necessarily have gills and some of them have lungs (I do not know whether it is only lungs, or both lungs and gills). I also do not know whether my snail has gills or lungs.
Haha adventure, you actually reminded me that I did indeed read why do they do that: in the wild some of them live not in big water reservoirs, but in small water puddles that are all over the place but periodically dry out and they often need to travel between the puddles.
And in aquarium, which never dries out I assume, they are maybe driven by hunger, or do it in search for a mate? I do not know.
Don't even need a reason like food or mate. It's the same reason we get restless sitting in front of a spreadsheet for hours. There's no purpose for that restlessness, but it's an evolutionary leftover.
What do you think about adding a tag that is something like "search and rescue" for questions like these pets.stackexchange.com/questions/31380/…? (I checked and there are many similar ones that could get the tag)
@Nai54 I think it is good idea and you are welcome to create the tag but I do not know how this is done so I cannot help unless you tell me what can I do, we have a tag rescue-organizations but it is different than what you are suggesting, your idea does not exist yet and is welcome.
@Sarov Haha okay did you advice him to try rolling and unrolling the paper?
@Sarov I was thinking about this and this is really interesting topic you started, anyway I do not really think that pet=slave, instead I am looking at it more like a symbiotic relationship where both parties benefit from each other's presence, and arguably some people see human-cat relationships as master-slave but cat is the master and human is its slave.
@Sarov haha that was so unexpected because I had this whole bot spiel out of focus now :D
Meat And Service Transporting Entertainment Robots
I am thinking about, for example, outdoor cats who could go away at any time, but they don't do it too often, and if they do then sometimes it is because the cat lost the way home instead of wanted to run wild.
I think you are one of the best gifts this chat room could receive, you regularly ask thought-provoking and intriguing questions that people just cannot ignore, just as if you enchanted them to contribute.
Oh okay okay, if we talk about free-will driven choice, then small children could be seen as slaves of their parents because they have no choice and nothing to say (papa government could say on their behalf, but I am ignoring that for now) and they serve a clear purpose for their parents (project immortality as the primary part). But I think nobody sees parent-child relationship as slave-master, but rather like a pack, or symbiotic relationship.
@Sarov I am now thinking what category would prisoners of war be, they are seen as prisoners and not slaves, but clearly serve a purpose, at least a passive one, giving the opposing sides leverage as negotiation power or in prisoner exchanges.
By the way, I was reading an article about whether non-human animals could display behavior of pet ownership, and it was a bit dark and I did not want to tell you all about it, but it is so interesting:
"Pet ownership by animals in the wild, as an analogue to the human phenomenon, has not been observed and is likely non-existent in nature. One group of capuchin monkeys was observed appearing to care for a marmoset, a fellow New World monkey species, however observations of chimpanzees apparently "playing" with small animals like hyraxes have ended with the chimpanzees killing the animals and tossing the corpses around."
And surprise surprise, this is not the first time I see yet another evidence to support my opinion that chimpanzees are giant fothermuckers and I am literally creeped out by them.
@lila Thanks! Creating new tags is easy, all you do is just type in a new tag in the regular tag box under the question while editing and submit, you get a popup asking if you're sure that you want to create the tag and if you accept, voila the machine automates a new tag.
@Nai54 Oh okay okay I see now, if we are talking about creating tags like this then I done this once before; I assumed that you need to click somewhere else so the tag goes to some queue for approval.
@Sarov I remember asking whether you have considered joining Pets and you said no because you have vet relative. I am not too smart that it took me so long to come up to a valid response: okay cool, what about joining pets to answer questions instead of asking then? Please please please consider this please please please.
@Sarov or these questions that you are asking on the chat, which honestly make me more and more convinced that "Sarov" is some kind of portmanteau of "Socrates" - some of them would make wonderful Q&A site questions, maybe if not immediately then after some fact checking and tweaking; you have this "spark" and wit to consistently produce quality questions with a certain "clickbait" vibe (in a good sense, in the sense of HNQ attraction).
