My kitten is a kitten that doesn't understand human rituals. AITA?

Yeah, I think so many people just never question what they grow up with, which I kind of get but there's so much information available now that it drives me crazy. It isn't hard to find!

I think there is some emotional resistance, too, because I think most of us have done things with animals that aren't ideal. For example, I used to use dominance-based training in my own dogs, because it's all I knew. Now I think a lot of techniques I used are low-key abusive. That's kind of a difficult thing to confront, you know?

It also makes it really difficult to educate some people, because they don't want to be wrong and they definitely don't want to think they're hurting their animals, who they do love. So you have to be so careful about what you say, because if you come across as judgmental (as a ton of animal lovers do), it'll just shut them down.

It's a difficult thing to navigate, and I wish people who were trying to advocate for animals were less judgmental because of that. I've worked with educational outreach programs in some shelters in areas with atrocious pet care practices passed down through generations (think like poor rural areas where it's just accepted that it's okay to leave a dog on a short chain 24/7/365, or the alternative is to let your dog run free and who cares if all your dogs die by the time they're 3 years old from being hit by cars or eaten by coyotes or shot for harassing livestock because that's just what happens to dogs, and also definitely no spay/neuter because it's natural for dogs to have puppies!), and even in those I've actually found the vast majority of people to be pretty receptive to learning if you can actually contact them and approach them in a nonjudgmental way while offering real solutions.

But it's hard to do and of course a lot of people are still going to be convinced they're right or it doesn't matter or whatever. I think low-key mistreatment of animals is so culturally ingrained that it's really difficult to address.

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