No, they will get me killed.

One unpopular opinion which is safe for me to share is that we should all own less pets, and need to cultivate much more green space in our cities if we want to have them.

• If you're American in the suburbs, this would mean people should not have lawns, but fill em with plants or crops.
• where i live this would mean more pocket parks and room for wildlife to thrive. Which requires some houses and disused buildings going, or more roads closed up for pedestrianised greenspace.

One reason i believe this is because cats, for instance, slaughter loads of little creatures. Just imagine - if half the households on a street has their own pet cat, all the mice in the area are getting killed. They're actually so much better st getting mice than rats, too, so it barely has that benefit. Rats are huge.

Another reason is because dogs ... they should be working, and they should have access to interesting greenspace. Sorry if you have a dog and can't provide this, i just think it's so fucked up that we have more dogs in the world than we can actually take care of in this way. Would you force a human to live most of its life indoors with nothing to do? Dogs need more company than many people afford them - i remember reading that people returned their dogs after lockdown because they wouldn't be able to take care of them when working full time, etc cetera.

So I would only have a dog if I had a big garden for it or a huge park nearby. I would ideally have some sort of role sharing with neighbours or friends where we both take the dog on walks. And, best case scenario, I would only have a dog to perform a specific task e.g on a farm.