Domestication of animals as pets removes them from their own emergent social and political structures and habitats and creates a critical dependency (unlike the multiple food source that animals will foster in non domesticated realms and functioning ecosystems). Nonetheless, this remains a rewarding, populist, persistent and tremendously meaningful experience for many people. Pets show remarkable adaptations to urban contexts (for instance: developing understandings of road rules, learning exotic sources of food and the urban rhythms that deliver this) and inter-species communication. Many studies show that depression and disease recovery is tremendously facilitated by pet companionship, and several hospitals have initiated pet visiting hours. Pet owners provide a large base of people who intuitively understand that empathetic, communicative, sustained and reciprocal relationships with animals, rather than instrumental relationship, are indeed possible and rewarding. In fact it is lay intuitions based on intimacy with pets that has provided most of the counterfactual evidence for the human centric cognitive models that dominated cognitive science and artificial life research and are now being systematically discredited. This is not to say that there are not many people who have never formed any relationship with animals, but this is a minority.

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