Mental Health, Stockholme Syndrome

[liz]

There are zoo animals who claim stray animals that get in their cage as pets.
My neighbors male cat who liked to hand out on my porch found a feral kitten and brought it home as a pet.
My male cat found a baby bunny and was carrying it like his baby and wanted to bring it in the house. The bunny was hanging there as if Momma had him.

[Pajarita]

But I disagree that pets are natural - pets are unnatural. Pet ownership is unnatural. Natural = nature. Human beings are the only species on the planet that shapes the environment (including domesticating small animals like parrots) to suit themselves, instead of adapting to the environment. It's not a moral or judgmental statement, though, just stating a fact.

Yes, natural comes from the word nature but humans are part of nature and as natural as any other animal species on earth - and the fact that we greatly change the environment to suit us doesn't make us less natural than any other species. So, having established that, I will take this a bit further and propose that pet keeping, an activity that has been present in every single civilization on earth and which has remained unchanged for, at least, the last 33,000 years is as natural as it can get. Sheesh, I can't even think of any other human activity that has remained unchanged for so many thousands of years!

[Dhraiden]

By that logic you can say anything is natural (like the weasel-words on products that say, 'all natural' - everything is, technically, natural!

But I get what you're trying to say. I still believe that when we began glomming together out of our proto-primitive state, for shelter, security, and sustenance, that we began to engage in a variety of non-instinctual behaviors, including pet-keeping! The example of ants 'milking' aphids is pure exploitation, essentially - not pet keeping as I see it. There are other examples of parasites living on larger insects by hollowing out cavities in their hosts brains - whose keeping whom? Macabre! haha...

Which is fine - if humans had stayed 'natural', we'd be no different than animals. Those societies that continue to live on the fringe of modern society - Inuit, for example - I think are the most close to nature, but there are no humans left living in a natural state. Or if there are, we call them apes

We, just like all other animals are bound by the constraints of our nature and do very little that is not in accord with our natural drives. Our denial of our rightful place in the natural world does nothing beneficial and only serves to lesson us as a source of support in the natural world all around us.

Also, we have no 'rightful' place in the natural world, anymore than mice or parasites or mosquitoes have a 'rightful' place - what's 'rightful' is whatever niche a species has carved out for itself. We decided we have a 'rightful' place at the top, having achieved that spot through mass-breeding and expansion. History is written by the victors and all! We'll never know what other (formerly) apex species think of the 'rightness' of our place in nature, nor does that really matter. I think when human expansion first began, we did in fact do very little not in accordance with our basic, natural, instinctual drives. Now, though, here we are on a forum, typing away! I'm not hunting caribou later, anyway.

All the species over time that went extinct (excluding human intervention and cataclysm) had no 'rightful' place - they unluckily did not breed and mutate (re: evolve) enough to survive. Since we stopped significantly physically evolving evolving ages ago, we adapted the environment instead, hence claiming our "rightful" place.

[Wolf]

I see no way in which we are really any different than any other species of animal. And the only thing that we have proven to be better at than other animals is destruction. I take that back, we are also better at building things.
Pet keeping came about as a direct result of exploiting the benefits of having other animals around us and cooperating with us. It was beneficial to let wolves hang around out camps as they helped to protect us from other animals and other humans.

[Pajarita]

We haven't stopped evolving. And I think you are confusing 'natural' with 'living in communion with nature'.

[Wolf]

We are all a part of nature and therefore have a niche to fill, which is our rightful place in nature. It is a whole different thing as to whether we fill that niche very well or not. It ia also another thing as to whether we accept this place in nature or not and it seems to me that this ends up being the deciding factor as to whether we work with nature or destroy the natural environments. It seems to me that the more we deny that we are a part of nature the more of it that we disregard as needed and proceed to destroy it.