Cute metaphor. It’s very fun to romanticize life in the wild. This is the attitude of a person frustrated with the trappings of society and longing for ‘freedom’. Your ideas of how important ‘freedom’ is to an animal are based on anthropomorphizing them, and quite ignorant of the suffering that is the daily fight for survival.

If you think a house pet would prefer that life, why don’t you spend a month in the woods and see what it’s like? After all, the dog you want to release into the wild comes from a family line that’s been part of human civilization for as long as civilization has existed.

Would you call anenomes a ‘guilded cage’ for a clownfish? Would you force them from the environment they’ve evolved to fit?

The human idea of ‘consent’ regarding animals is peak anthropomorphizing and painfully ignorant of how privileged we are. The only reason we can even consider ‘consent’ as a concept that matters at all is because we have societal structures to enforce order, to prevent simply fighting and killing each other for what we want. While ‘freedom’ is an important concept, social structure must limit it by necessity so that others can be safe.

We can’t ask the animals which they prefer, but with any real consideration it should be quite obvious that losing some freedoms in exchange for safety and comfort is an easy choice to make, after all, that’s the choice almost every human makes in that position. Calling it cruelty is nothing but ignorance.