The emergence and diversification of dog morphology (opens in new tab)

Why not just not breed unhealthy dogs, adopt the many stray dogs that persist and only once we have empty shelters consider breeding healthy breeds?

Dogs are beings, not toys or decorations.

A neighbor in particular previously had two french bulldogs with no snout. They'd spend all day panting and snoring. Once they passed away they got new ones, now with snout. They spend all day running and jumping instead.

lifespan seems to be more strongly correlated by size, not squashed-nosed-ness.

Consider chihuahua, shitzu's (and crosses: bichon-shitzu, ...), poodle crosses, heck lagotto (lagotti?). All can live well past 15.

Versus GSPs, great danes, Irish wolfhounds, and so on, coming in closer to say 6-10 years.

I've never really heard argument on lifespan of pugs et al versus other dogs, though. More around (perceived) ugliness/prettiness, and their breathing issues.

You’re thinking of the wolf pack that dogs came from millennia ago to be its “natural social life”. But the dogs around today are the result of myriad generations bred to be social with humans.

The natural social life of the dog is the human world. Humans and dogs co-evolved to live and work together. No other species enjoys this kind of symbiosis with us to this level; the horse probably comes the closest.

Fwiw my cats have friends that are deer, by virtue of there being deer in their environment, and their curiosity. And deer are quite curious too. Actually we have magpies that are friends with deer too. If cats were somehow pre-wired to only want to associate with cats, why are they associating with deer?

Cats famously domesticated themselves though. More of a symbiosis than subjugation

They gave up pack hunting, optimized cooperative socialization, amplified gentle and nurturing behaviors. Not only should all dogs be included in human lives, we have a moral responsibility to the species to provide for them the best possible existence.

This is not in support of fur-babies or dogs in strollers, to be clear. Dogs need function, stimulation, purpose, and relationships.

Cognitive studies, and the ongoing research with buttons, now in the tens of thousands of dogs and other pets, demonstrate that they're capable of understanding and using language, complex abstract thought, nuanced emotion, dreaming, strategizing, planning, and more. They'll never get to the point of writing books, but they can tell lies and play jokes, be sad, scared, brave, loving, goofy, and kind.

The idea that dogs should be wild is morally abhorrent - they are inextricably interwoven with the story of humanity, and dependent on us for their best lives. It's got nothing to do with affection, and everything to do with many tens of thousands of years of accelerated evolution resulting in specific complementary adaptations to humanity.

Slaves can state they want to be free, and often rebelled and resisted. Spartacus, the Zanj rebellion, the Haitian Revolution, and many more.

It requires constant indoctrination and denial of access to ideas and brutal suppression to even try to keep the resistance down even to those levels. No one censors what dogs can read (unlike, say, The Slaves Bible).

Dogs are demonstrably significantly intellectually inferior to human beings. other humans beings are not.

I do think it is lucky for them that other human species have not survived as they are demonstrably biologically different (at least not counting those we can interbreed with), probably unable to resist anything like as effectively, and would be far better slaves than humans and better experimental subjects than animals.