[greymule]

humans and dogs were destined to be friends with each other

The origin of dogs contains some mysteries, but they were probably bred within the past 15,000 years from the few wild canines—wolves—that were tame enough to hang around people and accept scraps of meat. The various breeds of dog were further bred for certain characteristics. (This has nothing to do with evolution. Dogs are not "evolved" wolves. In the wild, dogs and wolves would mate and produce fertile offspring, and the recognizable breeds of dog that we know would soon disappear.)

Recently a guy bred some wild foxes, choosing in each generation the calmest and friendliest of the litters, and after a few generations he hit the "tipping" point and was clearly producing dogs, not foxes.

If stray dogs run wild, they will revert to their instincts and form a pack. They can then be extremely dangerous. The pit bulls and Rottweilers that Vick and his friends bet on were of course bred for their fighting characteristics, the pit bulls specifically for fighting other dogs, the Rottweilers (I think) for characteristics that would be useful in the military.

As for PETA, they think that chicken farming is morally no different from gassing Jews, and their spokespeople have said as much on several occasions ("no moral difference between Frank Perdue and Heinrich Himmler"). Ingrid Newkirk, a cofounder of PETA, said, "A rat is a dog is a boy." She also said she hopes that foot-in-mouth disease or mad cow disease or whatever spreads to humans to teach us all a lesson for eating animals.

PETA activists once prevented a clothing store from putting out ant traps. (They did this by getting to the airhead woman who had inherited a controlling interest in the shopping mall that housed the store.) According to PETA, the store could move the ants to somewhere else, but not "murder" them.

Maybe PETA activists go after fur instead of leather because it's more fun to harass rich women than it is biker gangs.

Not too far from me lives a screwball who must be in the Animal Rights Hall of Fame. He says that even if we could cure cancer by killing one rat, it would be "speciesist" to do so. He also recommends that people have sex with animals, that "love" between a human and an animal would be healthy for both. He thinks that parents who find caring for a disabled child too difficult should be allowed to kill their child up to one year of age. He teaches ethics at Princeton University for several hundred thousand dollars a year. So if you're thinking of dropping $40,000+ a year for your kid to be Ivy League . . .