Thread by @lymanstoneky

ah but see my take is: racing horses for entertainment is fine because the net economic value is extremely high, but imprisoning animals in your house for fun is bad.

https://twitter.com/theloneamigo/status/1479037384666726402

if the economic value to society of a practice is sufficiently high, some amount of discomfort for animals is justifiable. discomforting a small number of horses so that millions of people can enjoy their racing is a fair tradeoff!

imprisoning an animal for life so that 2 or 3 or 4 people can enjoy oo-ing at it for 2 hours a day is, however, not great.

similarly, zoos are fine; everybody keeping a tiger in the backyard is not so fine.

Big caveat here of course, my ire is aimed at people keeping indoor/small yard pets.

If you've got 5 acres for your dog to run or a forest for your cats to become a scourge of the fieldmice, knock yourself out. I'm not opposed to human-animal sociality!

My distaste is purely aimed at urban/suburban pet ownership. If coyotes are preying on your land get some dogs for cryin' out loud!

In general, the economic activity generated per animal to justify keeping it must increase as the conditions in which it is kept deviate further from plausibly optimal or natural conditions.

(for animals with no natural conditions, like specialty dogs, I favor extinction)

Note here that I regard "providing nutrition for human survival" to be a very high value use, tho even there it does seem to me that factory farming is kinda problematic and like not in fact a great thing??

This is especially true for animals which are relatively social and intelligent, like dogs or pigs. If you want to cram a jillion fish in a tank that's fine by me. But your dog deserves a pack and a range!