Bro’s playing The Finals
staring at simulation with blinking lights intensifies
No need to hit so close to home mate.
My default assumption is that when animals do something I would do, they also think what I would think and feel what I would feel. If I’m having fun playing a game with a cat, the cat is having fun playing a game with me. Obviously animals can’t do everything that I can do, but that doesn’t mean that animals are somehow less sophisticated than I am when animals and I do do the same thing.
My dog and I usually did things as equals. For example, we both liked going outside when the weather was nice, hugging, wrestling, and visiting our friends. People would tell me that I was supposed to train him so that he would obey me, but I wouldn’t want to be trained to obey someone so I never trained him beyond the basic “don’t poop indoors.” (This makes certain other dog owners so mad for some reason.) The one issue where I really wish he could have understood me but he couldn’t was food. I had so much food, so why didn’t I feed him more? I don’t think he held that against me, but he did try to correct the imbalance by helping himself to anything edible that I left where he could get to it.
mammals are often social creatures, and ‘play’ is a required activity associated with being social (learning the rules).
i would counter though on the lack of training. you seem to want to treat the pet as you would yourself, but this is not the best way to look at it. you should treat them as your child and i think we all agree that children need guidance to achieve functional adulthood… sometimes rigidly so.
my dog needs to come when called for his safety, not because i demand respect or authority.
Even modern parenting has taken an odd twist as many treat their child as their friend or a toy for their amusement.
I don’t think that has never not been a thing… Read memoirs/letters from earlier times and you’ll see plenty of it too. The big shift was probably admitting the children don’t yearn for the mines, but we seem to be heading back that way (eta: in the USA anyway I won’t paint other countries with our fuckery lol).
