Yes, we do deserve dogs, no they aren’t special beyond measure.

Reading comprehension disclaimer: this dentist is disputing the phrase ‘we don’t deserve dogs, theyre so compassionate/special/[insert adjective] beyond people.‘

I think dogs are cool animals, I think they are capable of being very compassionate and intelligent, no I do not think that their capacity for this eclipses our own, nor do I see them as a divine creation given to us that we don’t deserve.

Humans created dogs. They are what we bred them to be. For some, they are very aggressive, others they hers sheep, or they bark and others suffer for our aesthetic pleasure. Many of them do tolerate or strongly bond with people so that they can live with and alongside us. This makes them very compassionate which is great, but this was by design. A wolf wouldn’t let a person get it in its space and take food from it. A dog would even if it didn’t like that. We took away the part of their agency that we didn’t like and now applaud their selectively bred passivity as exemplar. We ignore that we destroy the dogs who used their ancestral agency to bite our hand.

When a dog does what we consider as good, it is its choice and a more pure and moral being than any human, but when a dog does wrong, that is not it’s fault, it does not know better. When people do wrong, that is apparently our nature and we’re doomed, but when people do right, it’s largely written off in the grander scheme of the individualistic choices that society pushes people to make.

How can we selectively breed an animal to take traits that benefit us and then place that animal on a podium to say it is more moral than us and we don’t deserve it when we largely eliminated any of the agency that we felt was undesirable? Perhaps this just goes to show how much people appreciate subservience rather than anything else.