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

  • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    Yep, this one here. I disagree with others here that feel selective breeding of animals is objectively wrong. If I have a dog who was an especially wonderful pet, I might want to breed it with another that has a great disposition, and if I have one that was overtly aggressive, I might not want to breed it at all. That in itself isn’t bad.

    But people shouldn’t get to decide which other people get to breed, or with who, as unfortunately was done by slave owners with their slaves. A person with a terrible generic disorder deciding not to have kids in order to prevent passing along those genes is very different from forcing two people to have sex and have children because they have traits that are useful to you.