Stray cats and dogs are massively overpopulated, so there is no chance that they'll dissapear any time soon, even if the practice of commercial breeding were to somehow cease completely.
Evidence? I've been hearing this "overpopulation" argument since I was five years old. My father took me to a shelter to pick out a kitten, and explained the facts: the animals that are not adopted in a specified time period are killed because there are far too many. As I stood there listening, I could not help notice there were at least half a dozen empty kennels. Obviously, there was space for a few more kittens, or a few of the kittens already there had room to stay a few more days. I didn't argue then (what did I know?) but I have ever since: there is room, there are homes, and there are people willing to provide both care & money. The problem isn't "overpopulation"; rather the problem is finding more ways to connect the people with resources to the animals.
Thankfully, there is now some...cache?...to adopting that I think was formerly reserved for purebreds, which I think is a step in the right direction. But I think some shelters -and some state laws- have also put up hindrances that hurt the cause, too. It's a work in progress.
I can understand the philosophical disagreement, but for all practical purposes I don't see how it matters. There are way too many stray or abandoned animals that need adopting at present. Maybe at some point in the distant future, "should we breed dogs and cats so they don't go extinct?" will become a relevant topic of debate.
I don't believe there's nearly as many as there used to be. While I agree it's a good thing there aren't, I don't believe we can continue to use the "overpopulation" argument. It's growing thin -really thin.
It is a fact that it's something that happens, yes. That doesn't say anything about whether or not it's ethical.
"Ethical" is a moving target, depending on and changing with a huge number of variables. Your ethics may be an affront to my ethics. If something happens to change our minds, our ethics may change, too. There is no concrete set of "ethics" carved on a wall somewhere; we're all making them up as we go along, and we all face challenges to them sometimes.
There's also a difference, in my view, between killing a wild animal and deliberately bringing an animal into existence and subjecting it to a life of suffering and cruel treatment before killing it.
Are you saying that if all cows were wild cows, and every family had to go out to find and shoot a cow if they wanted beef for dinner that would be okay?
It sounds like your saying that raising animals for food is "a life of suffering and cruel treatment" by default?
Additionally, raising farm animals typically requires farming even more plant foods (in order to feed the animals) than the amount of food you get out of the resulting meat products. In other words, it will tend to take more soybeans (or whatever it may be) to produce a pork sandwhich than it will to produce a tofu sandwhich. Thus the former would result in *even more* unintentional mouse deaths in addition to all the cruelty inflicted on the pigs.
So we should stop raising farm animals? Every human should be vegan, and every cow should be a wild cow? If that's what you believe, fine. But I disagree. I don't want to eat tofu sandwiches, and I don't want to shoot my own cows.
In fact, I kinda laugh at this idea (Not you, just the IDEA) because to my thinking that's equivalent to tossing out thousands of years of human history and innovation. The cave men who looked out at a world where every cow was a wild cow and every bean stalk was a wild bean stalk started farming bean stalks and raising cows just because that situation was so problematic. Imagine the problems it would cause now? Can you just picture 30,000 wild cows wandering the countryside eating the crops and blocking the highways? With 30,000 weekend warriors with shotguns trying to bring down Sunday dinner?
(shakes head)
We still eat meat, and most of the world is pretty dependent on it. We still animals in all kinds of industry, and we still use them for medical research.
As to eating animals... Male chicks are thrown alive into grinders or garbage bins. Females are wing clipped and debeaked without anesthesia (yes, the beak is full of nerve endings) so they don't peck each other to death in the madness of extremely cramped and crowded conditions. Pigs (smarter than dogs in some ways for the record) are kept in crates where they barely have any room to move. I could go on. And that's before we even get to the killing part. It's weird to me that people see a dog left in a car while someone shops and get outraged, yet there is this dissonance when it comes to animals such as chickens, cows ans pigs.
I think we all agree factory farming methods have drawbacks. However, cramped and crowded conditions are not the cause of many of these problems. For instance: chickens peck each other to death, regardless of the size of the range. Cockfighting as a sport began because chickens peck each other to death as a normal, natural part of the behavior. They do it in small cages, they do it in big cages, they do it when they're not in cages at all. So, either we remove the beaks, or we let them peck each other to death. There is no other option. So far as using anesthetic, do you want that in the food? Imagine the cry of indignation when the public hears their Sunday fry has been fed anesthetics?
Can I take it you are unhappy about anti dog fighting laws then? Actually you should be against all animal cruelty laws period, since they all curtail humans' rights to inflict cruelty on animals.
I don't know what the current anti dog fighting laws are, so I don't know *exactly* what is illegal.
Fact: dogs fight for a variety of reasons. It's a normal, natural part of their behavior. Many dog fights are pretty intense, and sometimes dogs -and their owners- are injured or even killed.
If dogs are afforded
legal rights, and dog fights are illegal, who has committed a crime when two dogs have a dispute? The dogs, or the owners? If animals have legal rights, they must also have legal responsibilities, so since dogs fight as a normal, natural part of their behavior, how do we enforce laws against dogs fighting?
If dogs are afforded
moral rights, and most people agree dogs should not fight because it's against our human morals, is that a good justification for making it illegal? If so what part(s) of it? Or under what conditions?
If dog fights are illegal, is every dog fight a criminal act? If so, are humans obligated to put themselves into harms way to break up dog fights? Are humans expected to keep every dog from ever interacting with any other dog so that a fight is never, ever allowed to happen? Can Grandma be arrested if her Chihuahua is involved in a toothy tussle with the Chihuahua next door? Or are the laws only concerned with big, loud, muscled dogs that might send each other -or smaller dogs, or the owners- to the hospital?
Can we call a dog fight a form of animal cruelty when it is a natural, normal part of a dogs life?
For the record: I think encouraging dogs to fight is repugnant. It is against my ethics, and I have no problem if doing so is also illegal. 
