I actually don’t think it would be morally wrong, at least not intuitively! I care about actual suffering, factually experienced by a being capable of experiencing suffering, not of hypothetical suffering which another being of a different species would experience under the same circumstances. Having a working dog doing a job it enjoys and is bred to do seems no more wrong than having a penguin exist in conditions that would be unpleasantly cold for some other species. The biggest problem, I think, would come in in the likely event that breeding animals to do their job would result in them having conflicting values, like that they want to please humans or want to collect coconuts, but also want to be free to explore and lounge around all day, so that they’re experiencing frustration and unhappiness because of an artificially induced inability to fulfill all of their desires. Or if the breeding takes the form of inducing some kind of internal suffering when they disobey humans etc. The physical punishment, obviously, has to go as well—if they have to be forced into it, they obviously don’t actually want to do it. But a border collie doesn’t have to be forced into herding sheep, and indeed, they seem to be perfectly happy and I would not have an ethical problem with creating more animals like border collies.
I actually don’t think it would be morally wrong, at least not intuitively! I care about actual suffering, factually experienced by a being capable of experiencing suffering, not of hypothetical suffering which another being of a different species would experience under the same circumstances. Having a working dog doing a job it enjoys and is bred to do seems no more wrong than having a penguin exist in conditions that would be unpleasantly cold for some other species. The biggest problem, I think, would come in in the likely event that breeding animals to do their job would result in them having conflicting values, like that they want to please humans or want to collect coconuts, but also want to be free to explore and lounge around all day, so that they’re experiencing frustration and unhappiness because of an artificially induced inability to fulfill all of their desires. Or if the breeding takes the form of inducing some kind of internal suffering when they disobey humans etc. The physical punishment, obviously, has to go as well—if they have to be forced into it, they obviously don’t actually want to do it. But a border collie doesn’t have to be forced into herding sheep, and indeed, they seem to be perfectly happy and I would not have an ethical problem with creating more animals like border collies.