Doggy Ethics

What is indoctrination? What images float into your mind when the word struct you?

Is it an invisible hand forcefully pressing a stamp onto a forehead, an invisible mark that says "approved only"? Is it a row of identical trees planted so close together that none can grow sideways, only straight up? Sometimes indoctrination often sneaks in, disguised as “protection”.

As a typical teen, I always desired and respected freedom. And there are, indeed, lots of alternative forms of freedom that I come to appreciate.

Rights

Say training dogs. I didn't like training them because their nature should be appreciated. It felt like the same way humans impose their will on other humans. Its true that dogs are not a perfect parallel for humans and domestication happened to them over thousands of years. Nevertheless, over training should still be consider a violation of living thing's rights. Shouldn't every creature have the right to their own identity?

Something about the old-school training - alpha rolls, choke chains, forcing submission - does look disturbingly like indoctrination. It treats a dog's natural behaviors - sniffing, pulling, barking, chewing - as problems to be eliminated, not as expressions of a being with its own agenda. I believe a dog absolutely has a right to its own identity and we should not suppress their identity. A beagle who won't stop following her nose isn't "stubborn." She's being a beagle. A husky who sings at the moon isn't "disobedient." He's expressing something ancient and real.

So unless the training is done well - not about erasing identity but negotiating coexistence in a world neither of us chose - we should not advocate. The real violation isn't training itself but the coercion without consent(which would be apparent in the form of feelings), punishment without understanding. So the line I've landed on is : the right to identity means the right to express one's nature, except where that expression harms the creature itself or cannot coexist with others in the shared world. Allow space for individuality and flourishing. There is a line between excessive control and insufficient guidance for everyone.

Notice indoctrination is manually defined, which makes it hard to really specialize what kinds of training is suitable and which ones are not. Who defines coexistence? Who decides what counts as harm? If someone can define what is normal, what is deviant, what is moral and what is dangerous, they shape reality itself. Indoctrination is not just about control of behavior, it is about control of narrative. There is an essential difference between indoctrination and education, teaching, persuasion, socialization, protection, and its hard to regulate the boundaries between them. If we reject all shaping as indoctrination, we also reject culture, language, even moral reasoning—because those are inherited frameworks. None of us grow wild. Environmental constraints would be considered structural indoctrination.

Likewise, if every creature expressed every impulse fully, there would be no society. No safety. No stability. No long-term flourishing. What we can do, is to check whether limits of freedom are imposed violently or negotiated respectfully, who sets the limits and on what basis.

Another aspect is the evolution of identity. Identity is not just a static characteristic, it’s dynamic. A husky who learns impulse control is not less husky. A human who learns patience is not less themselves. So sometimes, suppression could actually be expansion.