Anyone else find equating pets and animals with humans to be rather strange?

[Humanist_Activist]

212. The assumptions I'm talking about are things such as "a dog is much better at swimming than a child"

and other issues related to that.

Call it a failure of imagination, but I can't think of a scenario outside of something being seriously wrong with the dog to make it equally unable to rescue itself, or at least prevent itself from drowning for a few minutes longer than a human child, or even a human adult who doesn't know how to swim.

You are talking about two species which are adapted in different ways, humans are generalists who aren't very good at pretty much anything physically except marathon running and thinking abstractly, whereas dogs are bred, in most cases, to be quite good at wading in water, and outside of sheer exhaustion or disability, are less likely to drown.

I guess problems can occur when you have too much knowledge about something.

Also, and I know this is quite silly, but a dog taught me how to swim, his name was Mork, he was my grandma's dog, a beagle. I mastered the dog paddle like you wouldn't believe when I was a kid.