Is it cruel to keep pets?

[zach.detton]

I don't think it's cruel at all. I used to live in Oregon and there's a cycle with deer and mountain lions. The deer get over populated and the lions eat well. This eventually causes the mountain lions to become over populated and there aren't enough deer to sustain their population so eventually a lot of them start dying of starvation. After the mountain lion population goes down, the deer population goes back up and the cycle repeats. To to control this the local wildlife services track and tag the deer and mountain lions and figure out how many deer hunting permits should be issued each hunting season. This keeps the deer population steady and that keeps the mountain lion population stead as well. If cats and dogs were in the wild again, they would have to compete with other wid animals and go through the same cycles.

[ikt]

How so? The chicken would eat the spider.

The example was the spider that would instantly kill the chicken, to explain a species may be evolutionarily stronger compared to another species that has more of it, evolution has neither sway here, it is simply a tool for adapting to the surrounding environment.

I think domesticated life including dogs and cats the OPs original topic have devolved

You can't devolve, only evolve, you adapt to your environment, if house cats are evolving to suit their primary environment (houses) then so be it.

[Paqman]

You can't devolve, only evolve, you adapt to your environment

This. If a domesticated animal evolves an adaptation that makes it better suited to it's domesticated environment then that's still progress as far as evolution is concerned. Evolution doesn't go in a particular direction, it's not always adding features. An example might be whales. When their ancestors left the sea they lost their flippers and evolved legs to walk on land, but when they went back to the sea they lost the legs and went back to tails and flippers. Evolution is quite happy to go backwards if the situation or opportunity demands.

[evilsoup]

I don't think that animals being 'cruel' in the wild is any kind of excuse for humans being unnecessarily cruel, which is what factory farming of livestock amounts to. Most people regard humans as having a unique moral ability, something that animals simply don't - probably a result of us forming much more complicated societies than anything else.

[Paqman]

I don't think that animals being 'cruel' in the wild is any kind of excuse for humans being unnecessarily cruel, which is what factory farming of livestock amounts to.

I wasn't intending to suggest it was an excuse. I just wanted to show that the situation wasn't as simple as a binary cruel/not cruel choice.

[Zukaro]

It's not cruel to keep domestic pets. Dogs, cats, etc; they've evolved to NEED humans. Cats are more independent and would likely be okay without humans (and often people with pet cats let them roam around freely anyways), but dogs need people.
If they were still wild then it would be cruel, but they've been bred to need us.

We need them too however; people with pets are generally happier and live longer (from what I've heard), and if that pet is domesticated (bred to live with humans) it'll want to be with us. If it's wild and just trained however, that's a completely different story.

[ermac76]

We should keep animals as pets because some animals like birds, cats and dogs cant survive the wild some house pets havent been traned to hunt and live by them selves and living in the wild can be scary for house pets and could get hurt or mabie die, So thats why we should keep pets.

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[IWantFroyo]

My little Yorkshire terrier wouldn't make it a day outside.