Member-only story
So long, puppy. You had a good run. It was your lot to have to depend on us, a bunch of smelly primates with barely any hair at all and an unbearable knack for destruction, to provide for your well-being. Sorry about that.
If I could speak your language, or teach you more than 165 words of mine, I’d tell you that after having lived with your kind for over fourteen millennia now, many of us humans agree: You are better than us.
Goodbye, puppy. I regret the rough treatment you probably had. We call you our best friends, but we ignore you, curse you, kick at you, and worse. All for the same behaviors our own programming so acutely desires: Eating all the junk food you can, humping legs, shitting on rugs, scratching yourself in public, getting so excited you spin in circles when someone you love comes home. You do all this without shame, which I suppose we greater primates resent. We’d like to do all those naughty things, too.
And so many of your species have it even worse than just getting kicked at. That’s mostly the fault of us, your ancient companions, who rescued you from the trappings of the wild and taught you to trust us. We dump you on the side of the road for convenience, break your bones for science, make you fight each other for sport, put chemicals in your eyes that blind you for vanity, or hurt you just for fun.
