[corey_moncure]

I speak from long experience in and around dog rescue. What you have to understand about animal people is that many of them are noble examples of humanity at its finest, and also that many of them use the pets as a weird kind of proxy battlefield for their personal political axe grinds and/or lunacy. The sane ones mostly tolerate this because at the end of the day, at least the animals are (hopefully) benefiting and that's what counts.

My wife was into rabbits for a bit, and we had one woman from a rescue tell us that you can bond two females together. Now at that time, we're completely naive to rabbits and don't know anything about bonding, or flopping, or thumping or whatever words rabbit people say, so we took her at her word. It wasn't until later after my wife took a nasty bite that I had a conversation with another rescue that I figured out this is just some extension of extreme feminist politics that weirdos are trialing live on their unwitting pets. Of course "bonding" means exactly what you'd think it means, and therefore in the real world two female rabbits don't do it. I felt really embarrassed in that moment.

Same thing with people feeding their cats (obligate carnivores) a vegan diet and stuff.

[autoexec]

> I figured out this is just some extension of extreme feminist politics that weirdos are trialing live on their unwitting pets.

Lots of people bond pairs of females rabbits without any involvement of extreme feminist politics. Rabbits are social creatures that normally live in groups. Many people who have rabbits for pets don't want to host an entire community of bunnies, but also know that a solo bunny is a sad one so owning pairs of rabbits is very common. People may end up with same sex pairs by circumstance or choice (it's one way to help avoid ending up with more than two bunnies).

If all you've got are two girl bunnies, and you can take the time to do it, getting them to be friends can make them both much happier. Especially if they're already kept in close proximity because rabbits (females especially) are territorial and can get stressed if they're always seeing/smelling an "outsider".

[itishappy]

Same with many (most?) rodents. Growing up, we raised pairs female guinea pigs and mice. It made a huge difference in the temperance of the guinea pigs from the solo male we had, not sure if this was due more to socialization or gender.

(Ironically, both guinea pigs and mice immediately had litters. We had to have the vet re-confirm their sex, as guinea pigs can be difficult to tell apart. Both were indeed female, they were pregnant from the store... 1 baby guinea pig, 15 baby mice.)

[gdulli]

I guess the situation isn't so straightforward after all and people in general assess others' actions as a proxy for their own beliefs just as pet owners might use their pets that way.

[jstarfish]

> Same thing with people feeding their cats (obligate carnivores) a vegan diet and stuff.

This is just animal abuse.

> My wife was into rabbits for a bit, and we had one woman from a rescue tell us that you can bond two females together. [...] I figured out this is just some extension of extreme feminist politics that weirdos are trialing live on their unwitting pets.

There was a lot of this sort of rhetoric back when gay marriage was on the horizon-- people started looking to the animal kingdom to normalize homosexuality. Gayness is what it is, but nothing these people spontaneously presented aligns with anything I've seen in a lifetime of organic animal ownership.

In my experience, female animals of every kind do not get along in captivity-- they don't become lesbian lovers, they just kill each other (try having two female roommates!). They're crazy aggressive (my female dog becomes a violent rapist of my male when in heat) and in ownership or dogsitting it's only female dogs that have ever bitten through my skin. Of four cats, the three females fight each other constantly, and two of them constantly sneak out to kill rats. In humans, sororities are a discreetly-abusive nightmare, and lesbian domestic violence rates are roughly 2x that of gays (and ~1.5x that of male heterosexuals).

Best keep them separated.

[pjmlp]

As someone that has always been around cats and dogs a great deal of my life, and reaching 50, I never got that.

For millions of years they did just fine without any kind of gourmet food, or stupid fancy clothes.

[blacksmith_tb]

To a point, we've also bred at least some them to have some fairly severe health problems, and also raised them in a dramatically different way then they would have evolved with - but of course we also keep them from dying young from disease or starvation.

[pjmlp]

Wolves and other felines aren't doing that bad, other than survival issues caused by mankind.