Is the value of a dog's life subjectively tied to the enjoyment of the owner? May as well shut down when the owner is asleep too... or, get a robot dog instead.
I think you and most of the other commentators are not reading the suggestion the way it was intended.
Dogs are usually very social. If they are left alone they will often be very unhappy. I think what was being suggested was that if a dog that was going to be left alone for half the day each work day could be "turned off" during that time so it would not experience those hours of loneliness it would make the dog's life happier.
#In a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchise on the outskirts of Phoenix, Rat Thing number B-782 comes awake. Fido is waking up because the dogs are barking tonight. There is always barking. Much of the barking is very far away. Fido knows that faraway barks are not as important as close barks, and so he often sleeps through these. But sometimes a faraway bark will carry a special sound that makes Fido excited, and he can't help waking up. He is hearing one of those barks right now. It comes from far away but it is urgent. Some nice doggie somewhere is very upset. He is so upset that his barking has spread to all the other doggies in the pack.
Fido listens to the bark. He gets excited, too. Some bad strangers have just been very close to a nice doggie's yard. They were in a flying thing. They had lots of guns. Fido doesn't like guns very much. A stranger with a gun shot him once and made him hurt. Then the nice girl came and helped him.
These are extremely bad strangers. Any nice doggie in his right mind would want
to hurt them and make them go away. As Fido listens to the bark, he sees what they look like and hears the way they sound. If any of these very bad strangers ever come into his yard, he will be extremely upset.
Then Fido notices that the bad strangers are chasing someone. He can tell they are hurting her by the way her voice sounds and the way she moves.
The bad strangers are hurting the nice girl who loves him!
. . .
At first, the only trace that B-782 leaves of his passage is a dancing trail of sparks down the center of the franchise ghetto. But once he makes his way out onto a long straight piece of highway, he begins to leave further evidence: a
spume of shattered blue safety glass spraying outward in parallel vanes from all
four lanes of traffic as the windows and the windshields of the cars blow out of their frames, spraying into the air like rooster tails behind a speedboat.
As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring
the noise.
Maybe we need this for dogs, so their lifespan isn't substantially squandered when their owners are at work.