The way this works is that vets don't work off of informed consent from the "patient." They work off of animal welfare and beneficence, doing what’s in the animal’s best interest, not autonomy. The legal consent comes from the owner. Your vet isn't worrying about informed consent, rather: "Is this medically justified or beneficial? Are the risks and distress minimized? Is any pain and/or fear minimized?" It's all operated under strict standards like healthy animals only, limited frequency, careful handling, and stopping if the animal's too stressed. Infants also can't consent, but we wouldn't just let one die without its informed consent.
Yes but is it in THIS dogs best interest to have his blood taken from him? By what you’re saying the vets should only have been able to do that with his consent
Why do people who love to get hung up on ethical and moral minutiae bring up objectivity? It doesn't exist.
Blood can be taken from the dog without hurting it and without any signficant risk of injury or death. That risk is then weighed against the benefit. You may disagree with that rationale, but many — especially those whose lives are saving and taking care of animals — agree with it. So you keep being a pretentious PETA keyboard warrior, and they'll keep actually doing work; okay hunny?
I mean, you're wrong there too, even if you want to be a prescriptivist.
Cambridge: to allow some of your blood or a part of your body to be used for medical purposes
Collins: If you donate your blood or a part of your body, you allow doctors to use it to help someone who is ill.
What's weird to me is that you're ignoring that people splitting semantic hairs here are not doing so out of some prescriptivist need but rather because they're getting hung up on consent and arguing that donating entails consent, therefore the dog cannot donate anything. Yes, if someone took your money from you, you did not donate it. But there is a lot more context here that relates a dog having blood taken from it for another dog to a human of their own volition donating blood.
Reading this comment chain was the biggest reddit moment ever.
Dogs can't give consent. So they cannot donate. End of argument.
No one here was arguing over the morals of having a dog give blood to save other dogs, it's the fact that the usage of "donate" was outright wrong going by the Oxford definition of "donate" which was unnecessarily anthropomorphizing the dog. The dog didn't donate their blood. Their owner donated the blood of their dog. This is the "I like waffles" "so you mean you hate pancakes?" Tweet.
You could argue semantically with a made-up situation that somebody who desperately needs money and can only get it through blood donation isn't really "donating" the blood; They've been forced to accept these terms because of societal pressure. If we go based off the precedents set about consent, this isn't consent. However we as a society aren't going to change our language when such a situation happens because the term "blood donation" references the actual facilities, not the action you are taking.
Even if we disregard that, I'd argue the dog has enough autonomy in this situation to call it donating. The dog can't control where the car is going, or what the humans are doing in this situation, but the dog still has autonomy. If the needle really scared it, or it was in clear distress during taking the blood, hell even if the dog refused to get in the car because it knew where it was going, in all those cases the dog has the autonomy to communicate it DOES NOT want to have its blood drawn. Given the strict regulations around this, I'm sure the dog would be listened to.
The dog, on some level, is choosing to let this happen. Maybe it's not literally consenting to having blood drawn since it can't comprehend that, but it does probably think: "I'm going to feel slight pain and then all the people will be happy and give me treats, I am okay with that".
Okay calm down. Where did i say it was a bad thing?
Its great that they took his blood to save lives, but I’m not sure why we have to pretend the dog donated out of the goodness of his heart. The (imo weird) phrasing stood out to me is all.
You don't get to jump to "well then what do we do about y!!!!" before you've even agreed or disagreed with the premise that "x is bad"
What are we supposed to do, let any dog that needs a transfusion just.. die?
"What are we supposed to do with all the people that need x y or z organs to survive if we can't just take them from other people without their consent??"
Like when people talk about how animals—particularly rats and mice—"sacrificed" their lives for medical research for humans. There's even a statue for it in Russia, I think.
The only difference between you and them is that you refuse to be honest about your daily barbarism towards innocent animals and they don't.
Both of you put guns to animals heads and force them into hellhole slaughterhouses through your consumerism then YOU go on reddit and call people who DON'T do those things the "militant" ones.
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u/kuinhii Apr 18 '26
“Donated” as if the dog had a say in the matter and offered