Charles Danten, former veterinarian
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| Alice in Wonderland 2 |
In their book, Welcome Home: An Animal Rights Perspective on Living With Dogs & Cats, the Winograd's from their wonderland mischaracterize my book and evade the real issues altogether.
My book, Slaves of Our Affection. The Myth of the Happy Pet is about the dark side of today's pet keeping fad. It shows unequivocally that the exploitation of animals on an industrial scale for ideological, recreative, sentimental, financial, and commercial reasons, for example, is detrimental to animals, humans, and nature. This fad is not about love but about careerism, egocentrism, virtue-signalling*, affection-slavery, escape, money, lies, and more lies.
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| Down the Rabbit Hole |
Yet, the Winograd's do not say a single word in their appreciation of my book about the negative aspects of affection-slavery, which are at the crux of Slaves of Our Affection. They delve into several common fantasies about how animals think - how the Winograd’s know is a real mystery to me - and how animals choose and enjoy being kept as slaves for mostly trivial reasons. They twist the facts to suit their purpose and fail to mention one of the most important topics of my book: the alleged psychological and physical benefits of pets - which are one of the main causes of the pet phenomena - have been debunked by numerous top-notch quantitative studies.
Pets like all placebos have a superficial effect on about 30% of pet owners. They do not cure anyone of their mental and physical ills. This explains why so many animals are abandoned and euthanized or kept for life in no-kill shelters ran by delusional or dishonest people who have made a career out of this barbarism with a smiley face. Once people realize they have been fooled by the false allegations of the pet industry and the many useful idiots that promote it under the guise of Animal Rights, love, and compassion, they throw their junk-pets away in some dump euphemistically called "shelter" and buy some other feel-good prop that doesn't bite back or doesn't need to be cleaned, fed or taken out.
As I explain in my book, dogs and cats did not domesticate themselves as the Winograd's state without giving a single shred of evidence. Someone had to get the ball rolling at one point or another because it goes without saying, animals are obviously unable to practice artificial selection on themselves - it's so obvious, it seems absurd to even have to specify it! Eugenism which is routinely used to create domestic animals is a strictly human thing.
In short, my book is not really about animals, but mostly about humans and how they hide behind good intentions and good sentiments to exploit animals and deceive themselves at the same time. It's about veiled cruelty, the most horrible kind of cruelty there is, much worse than manifest cruelty such as vivisection, trophy hunting, and intensive farming, because it is not at first visible to the naked eye. Unless you are willing to go down the rabbit hole to examine the root causes, like I have done in my book, it escapes the radar altogether.
* Virtue-signalling: expression or promotion of viewpoints, behaviours or actions, that are especially valued within the social group, done primarily to enhance the social standing of the person employing them.
* Virtue-signalling: expression or promotion of viewpoints, behaviours or actions, that are especially valued within the social group, done primarily to enhance the social standing of the person employing them.
Charles Danten, B.Sc., D.V.M. M.A.