Mustard only?! I am definitely the dog in the hot dog car.

On “mutual ownership”. I’m not convinced that anything, whose agency has been removed through confinement, can be said to have equal weight in the decision to be owned, and thus be claimed “mutual”.

You give evidence of our like behavior with other animals, and claim that my position MUST operate from the belief of our “difference and superiority”.

Consider the inverse: Humans are not distinct and not superior. Therefor, all animal behavior is acceptable human behavior, for we are not but animals.

Its not exactly the society most would want to live in. People can and do use animal nature as means to justify horrible behavior. “Its a dog eat dog world, the villain proclaims”, as if the only surprise is that their victim would have expected it any other way. Mantises devour the male after copulation. Why then do you demand I not do the same?! Pointing to the way things are in nature as a means to find justification for human behavior doesn’t seem to lead to a useful foundation for ethics; maybe it even to to its dissolution.

So yes, I think we’re different. I think that in many ways our difference comes from our responsibility of stewardship. Because we do have knowledge, agency and control to the degree that we can destroy or restore environments.

Picking up wild animals which would much prefer to be left alone, so you can get your picture taken, is not loving them. Keeping animals in cages so you can have something on your shelf to look at, is not loving them. Most animal ownership is possession for the possessive, masquerading as caring.

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I like the prefix marks. I wish we used them for all of our punctuation. They improve readability. Imagine if we removed the leading double-quote on our quoted lines.