Post
Region: The Transitionists
While there are many convincing arguments for allowing dogs to vote, most in the current situation would agree that it is not a logical step right now, although similar proposals may be considered in the future.
One of the biggest fundamental differences of dogs is that their culture is extremely different to us. No known dog can read human language, or fully understand any text's true meaning, which will act as a fundamental impediment to the meaningful participation of canines in our democratic system. One of the main purposes of democracy is to put a good government in place that will use power responsibly and act in a way that benefits citizens, both in the present and in the future. Until the day that abstract concepts can be accurately translated for our canine buddies to understand, allowing dogs to vote may jeopardise the decision making process, with bad or intentionally misleading translations possibly tilting dogs' votes toward ideas that are rather short-sighted or impractical in the short or long run.
Many current democratic systems that work for the people and the entity as a whole were developed in or adapted to a reality that there is a clearly defined boundary of who can vote and who cannot vote. New discoveries of humans isolated from "civilisation" are exceedingly rare in current times, which causes a stable and easily defined human population that should be given full rights, including the right to vote. However, the line separating dogs from their wild relatives is less clear. Accepting dogs to be able to vote would either mean drawing an arbitrary line between canines on who has democratic rights and who does not, or allowing all canines, regardless of perceived ferality, to have an equal vote, which would also mean allowing wild dogs to vote. When the boundaries are blurry, lines have to be drawn somewhere, and there is no good solution.
All of this precludes the most pressing issue. While dogs are no doubt great friends of humanity, allowing them the right to vote also opens the door to other animals. After dogs, who else? Cats? Snakes? Grasshoppers? Again, boundaries are very blurry. There is no way to simply draw a line between animals that should be able to vote and should not, just as our definition on which animals to eat and which to not mostly depend on historical boundaries. A solution that comes to my mind is IQ. However, of course, animals display variations in any statistic, including IQ, within a species, and our human conscience is past classifying humans by their IQ for voting rights, which would probably mean we would have problems segregating members of another species by a similar statistic.
Dogs hold a special place in humanity's heart, and, like all animals, we share this earth and need to take care of it. In my opinion, instead of giving animals the right to vote, we need to take it upon ourselves to protect our pets, our animals and our environment. That would be doing much more for them than blindly affording them democratic rights.
