Are Pets Living Through an Existential Nightmare?

HavelsOnly writes about feeling sorry for dogs.

The most accurate thing I can say about dogs is I feel sorry for them. My immediate family didn't own dogs growing up, but my extended family had farms or large acreage plots with 3-5 dogs running around all day. They eat, sleep, shit, and run around exploring with their pack hours a day whenever they want.

Compare to city dogs. Mostly live in matchbox apartments. A typical weekday is likely 9-12 hours home alone. You can't run. You can't shit. You are bored out of your fucking mind. Your human comes home and walks you for 15 minutes on a leash. It's the highlight of your day. Human is tired and eats dinner in front of the TV while you get scratches. Maybe you sleep in the same bed as your human. You're probably pretty tired after an entire day of mostly not moving /s.

Weekends if you're lucky, you go to a dog-friendly park. Maybe you get off leash. Maybe you never get off leash because you're too spazzy around other dogs/humans. It's completely understandable to be spazzy. You are chronically understimulated. One of your only opportunities to get energy and action in life is by "misbehaving" or harassing strangers.

When I walk past someone with a dog and the dog is just pulling as hard as s/he can at the leash to pounce on me, you can't think that's instinct. No animal in the wild thinks it's a good idea to go fuck with something 3-30x it's bodyweight. It's pure boredom. The dog is just trying to stimulate itself before it's forced back in front of the TV to watch The Office again.

I think about this literally anytime urban dogs and cats come up as a topic. I don't believe that animals have the same moral weight as humans, but I agree they have some, and I'm lowkey horrified at the existence they lead. I volunteered at a farm a while back. It was a bucolic paradise praised by Michael Pollan. I am and was a big meat eater then and my girlfriend was vegan, and I specifically volunteered at a beef/poultry farm to see if I was comfortable with the full breadth of agricultural production. The farm had chickens, turkeys (who really do gobble back at you), about three hundred steers, and a few barn cats. Even though almost all were ultimately going to be killed and eaten (a fate that I would argue is infinitely more humane than anything nature has to offer) , pretty much all of them got to live out nearly a platonic ideal. The steers ate grass, shat, and hung out. The chickens ate grasshoppers and gossiped. The cats hunted field mice then lazed about the rest of the day. None had any predators or lack of food to worry about. Hard to argue that any were lacking stimulation, at least from the standpoint of what they evolved to expect.

When I think about pets, I can't help but see tortured beings. Sure, they love going on walks and not worrying about food and shelter, but holy fuck must they be fucking bored out of their minds. I'm imagining sitting at home by myself unable to pee or shit or do anything except eat and sleep. It's fucking horrible.

It's possible that they don't really have the mental capacity to truly understand what they're missing, but I'm doubtful for the specific reasons outlined above. I wonder if, as our understanding of other sentient being's capacity improves, whether we'd look back on this time period as one of particular cruelty. As it stands, unless I own a farm or something similar, I can't morally justify keeping an animal prisoner like that. And this is coming from someone who has absolutely no issue eating/killing animals.