Jesus! This is going to piss off a lot of my friends and alienate a lot of my followers.
But it has to be said.
Your pets don't need you. Your pets don't "love" you. At best, your pets are addicted to you and you are their enabler.
The symbiotic relationship between primates and canines began somewhere between 10,000 - 2,000 B.C.E.
"During the most recent ice age, from about 20,000 years ago (see Ice Ages), large mammals such as bison roam on the sub-arctic tundra of Europe and Asia. They are preyed upon by two groups of hunters, both much smaller and weaker than themselves - but both with a sufficiently developed social system to enable them to hunt and kill in packs.
These hunters are humans and wolves.
The typical pack of wolves and of humans is surprisingly similar. It it is family-based, led by a dominant male whose female partner is likely to have an authority second only to his. Members of the group are friendly to each other but deeply suspicious of outsiders. All members (not just the parents) are protective of the newly born and the young. Both species are good at interpreting the moods of others in the group, whether through facial expression or other forms of body language.
Legend acknowledges these shared characteristics in stories of children suckled by wolves. The other side of the same coin, in real life, means that wolf cubs adapt easily to life among humans.
For mutual benefit
Humans and wolves are competing for the same prey, but there are advantages for both in teaming up. For the wolf, human ingenuity and the use of weapons mean a share in a greater number of kills - and perhaps even an occasional taste of larger victims, such as mammoth. For humans, the wolf's speed and ferocity is equivalent to a new weapon.
The partnership is natural.
Read more: http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab57#ixzz1I8fs0btg"
We spent the last 20,000 years cruelly and selfishly breeding survival skills out of our "animal companions" in favor or docility and cuteness.
Canines used to look like this.
Thanks to human "kindness" and our "domestication", now they look like this.
The ancestors of our house cats were more than capable of fending for themselves.
Not anymore.
But here is the thing.
If humans disappeared tomorrow, cats and dogs will be just fine. The teeth, claws, speed and ferocity that allowed canines and felines to survive before we came along and fucked them up will once again rise to the top.
Oh, it will be brutal, there will be much carnage, and many human-contrived species will be eliminated in short order. Dachshunds will go quickly. We bred their legs too short to run from predators.
But the point is, not only do canines and felines not need us, we are actively holding them back and hampering their survival skills by pampering them spoiling them and giving the ridonckulous levels of health care.
I remember walking out into the woods with one of my best friends and one of his favorite, terminally ill, hunting dogs so he could put a merciful bullet into his head to prevent him from suffering.
These days people subject their pets to chemo-therapy, radiation, special diets, artificial limbs, organ transplants, blood transfusions and expensive medications.
Really? Seriously?
Fuck, I'm a human and I don't even want that much intervention.
If I have a painful, in-grown hair? Pull the fucking plug! I have no desire to bankrupt my family to prevent my suffering. I don't care what the ailment is, if the treatment is expensive, long, barbaric and painful? Walk me out into the woods and put a bullet through my head.
You are torturing your animals and needlessly bankrupting yourself with your "kindness".
Let animals be animals.
Put "Mother Nature" back in control and quit buying boats for Vets.
