hotspur [he/him]
so that does look very suspicious. question tho–who is he running the op for, deep state with capitol police being read in? farther down in that twitter feed the FBI appears to have put him on their wanted posters, so are they just not in on the play?
Yeah it’s a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, it’s probably not ethically all that great that humans practice intense eugenics creating non-natural dogs for work and companionship. That said, they did, and the dogs exist. I suppose I could buy an argument that we need to phase out breeding and domestic pet ownership on a moral level along the lines of the moral argument against breeding and killing livestock, etc, but until that day, there is a net ethical good in responsible pet ownership.
For my personal example, I have a Dutch Shepherd from a police line of dogs (dutch KNPV). She did not have the maximum desirable traits that the breeder looks for, so he didn’t want to breed her, and would have likely sent her to central america for “executive protection” duty, ie guarding some rich asshole or cartel boss or whatever. Instead, we got her, and she gets lots of scratching, delicious food and gets to chase squirrels and guard her den (our home). It’s not a horrible outcome for her, and certainly is a great outcome for us–she gives us lots of love and companionship.
re: dogs working, it’s another tricky concept. If the working involves what would be abuse, I’d completely agree. For some dogs, like mine, that have been generationally selected to have high drive, they are actually much happier and more content if they have “jobs”. In our case, since we’re not professional dog handlers, her jobs are silly things around the house, like holding on her place mat, or fetching things, or “helping” me with the compost. But working dogs get a lot of satisfaction out of using their noses, and other abilities, in concert with a handler to do stuff.
yeah SAR dogs get really depressed and get PTSD just like other first responders. If they’ve had a bad day, like only finding dead people in rubble after a building collapse, the handler will often stage a find with a friend so that the dog can find someone alive, because they will seriously get depressed and start to burn out. There’s nothing naturally evil in dogs, it’s just what we do to them that’s evil. Kinda like kids, I guess… I suppose you can have a few natural psychopaths in both kids and dogs, but usually, it’s abuse or mistreatment that results in the real bad stuff.
the dog above is a malinois, a super high drive dog that can do just about anything. they excel at nosework, any kind of work task you can train them, and protection work (running, biting and detaining). They’re not naturally mean or aggressive, but really really high drive with an amped prey drive, so it’s all about what you train them to do. nosework dogs can be trained to sniff for bombs, drugs, corpses, and now even diseases like covid or cancer for instance. You could take a bomb dog and retrain them to smell for drugs, because they understand the basic mecanism, but obviously, the dog will perform better on the task if it has a lot of experience. you can use a large variety of dogs for nosework, so you’ll see TSA bomb dogs that are like cute cuddly labs and hounds, but if you want to use the dog for law enforcement or military functions, you need something like a malinois, dutch shepherd, german shepherd that have high prey drives and lowered fear reaction. I have a dutchie, and she’s an amazing dog, but is nothing like my parent’s standard poodles for instance–she requires a lot of training and management. We do not use her for protection (other than barking at anything that makes a noise on our porch I guess). Anyway, they’re perfectly loving and friendly dogs, but they require you to build a relationship with them, they do not approach situations with strangers with an open heart like a nice golden retriever does.
lol calling a highly trained malinois friendly is a contradiction in terms. more like, a force of great destruction imbued with impulse control.
try out tarkov. It’s made by a Russian Dev, so the UN and the American PMCs/corporation are “sorta” the bad guys, though its a lot more grey area than that. It’s in beta though and the story isn’t super fleshed out yet. The Raid series of mini movies on youtube can give you an idea about lore though, pretty interesting.