And I find it not just annoying, but abysmally ignorant, when people assume that animals don't have feelings. After all, we share a billion or so years of evolution.
Dogs don't have human emotions. I don't know what your point is here. I never said they don't have emotions, sure they have some (simpler) dog emotions. They aren't human, they don't have human emotions.
Yeah, and if you, me, and my dogs are stranded on a desert island, guess who's gonna be lunch :-)
I don't know if you are asking seriously... and I don't know you or your dogs, but if I had to guess and playing the odds, I would say one of your dogs would be lunch. You may not eat him with me, but I can almost guarantee that your other dogs would dig right in with me. That's how dogs are, you know... not human. They don't care, they would probably eat you too if you died and I put some gravy or peanut butter on you.*
It's not a heirarchy of life thing. It's about friendship - or call it tribalism if you like. I value my friends/members of my tribe, human or animal, more than I do the rest of the world.
That makes sense. I just don't have the part of the brain that would want to draw a dog into my family I guess. Then even if I did, I would never value my dog over a human, even a stranger in a head to head contest. It is one thing to indirectly do it, by feeding your dog instead of a theoretical personb, but if forced to choose between a dog and an actual person, i would always choose the human over the canine, regardless of how long I had known the dog or what bond I thought we shared or whether he was in my tribe.
I am not trying to bash pet owners here, and I don't dislike animals. I just never really understood pet ownership and what drives it and why people feel so passionately about it.
* I don't actually eat animals or people at all.