No I’m not a fascist (at least I hope not…)

I’m trying to understand why we’ve normalised the idea of eugenics in dogs (e.g. golden retrievers are friendly and smart, chihuahas are aggressive, etc.)¹ but find the idea of racial classification in humans abhorrent.

I can sort of see it from the idea that Nurture (culture and upbringing) would have a greater effect on a human’s characteristics than Nature would.

At the same time, my family tree has many twins and I’ve noticed that the identical ones have similar outcomes in life, whereas the fraternal ones (even the ones that look very similar) don’t really (N=3).

Maybe dog culture is not a thing, and that’s why people are happy to make these sweeping generalizations on dog characterics?

I’m lost a little

1: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/df/74/f7/df74f716c3a70f59aeb468152e4be927.png

  • ___@lemm.ee
    61·
    9 months ago

    How is he confusing the two? We selectively breed dogs for traits and do not allow their offspring to procreate. I’m sure there are puppy mills that kill the “undesirables” too. I don’t think OP is conflating anything.

    • PonyOfWar@pawb.social
      4·
      9 months ago

      We selectively breed dogs for traits and do not allow their offspring to procreate. I’m sure there are puppy mills that kill the “undesirables” too.

      I never denied that. But in the description they conflated it with just talking about genetics affecting a persons/dogs characteristics. There is a difference between acknowledging that and the act of selective breeding to reach certain characteristics. It’s not eugenics to say “a person may have a genetic tendency towards ‘trait x’”, eugenics would be “let’s selectively breed people to encourage ‘trait x’”.

      • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
        2·
        9 months ago

        That said, I’m pretty sure all of us picked our mates because of traits we found desirable. Some of those traits are certainly genetic.