While there are some surface level similarities to owning a pet and having children, it’s absurd to conflate the two as if they are equivalent.
The /r/petfree subreddit is hysterical in the opposite direction at times but there is some fascinating content on there sometimes. An example: a social media post of someone mourning their child's death, folks commenting about the death of their pets as if it were comparable:
https://www.reddit.com/r/petfree/comments/1kzlt3o/people_arg...
> My three year old killed by a drunk driver. A lady said I know how you feel, my dog died last year
> Idk about you but I loved my dogs more than anything. I felt guilty for a long time bc I sobbed for days after each was put down but didn't cry at my cousin or grandfather's funeral
> I loved my dog and mom exactly the same, and their deaths both felt the same
> It's been scientifically proven that a dog death can effect you more than a human one
Leaving work early to deal with kid(/dog) stuff, public spaces tolerating the presence of your loud, annoying, not-that-clean kid(/dog), an expectation of urban spaces providing places for your kid(/dog) to go to the bathroom. Etc.
Plus nobody enforces a lot of health and safety laws anymore, it's not uncommon to see dogs in grocery stores for example, despite it being illegal and gross.
What exactly are people not achieving when they have a dog?
I bought my first home in my twenties, have a very high paying job, I have good friends, I play music sometimes, I grow my own food, I can cook better than most restaurants, I am happy most of the time, I am reasonably physically fit and can climb a mountain (literally).
What meaningful progress is my dog holding me back from?
What I've seen is they aren't getting into real relationships or developing hobbies, and are instead becoming attached to their pets. I know it's dismal but the loneliness associated with being single is supposed to motivate you into improving yourself and finding a partner. By spending money and a few hours a day with your pet, you're not doing other (potentially more real) things.
In fact, things like taking my dog for a walk is a pure positive. I get exercise and sometimes my family comes along for the walk too. That's a boost to my family's health and relationships enabled by the context of caring for the dog. So trying to portray dog ownership as a pure energy drain is just not true.
Some objective things having a dog has forced me to do:
* I go outside more often * I meet more people outside and many have become friends * I have a schedule every day
* I mean take good care of the dog obviously. It's not just a tool to improve your love life. But like if you genuinely think dog ownership is holding people back from romance, you really don't know how things work.
GP was referring to this group of people whose lives consist of only work and their pets. Clearly you do not fall into this group. In fact, given your lifestyle (a healthy, balanced one), I'd say a pet has great potential to further enhance personal development.
If that connection with their dogs is what brings them personal fulfillment, why is that not meaningful? And can they not personally develop within that chosen life path?
What are people not building too that you think they should? What have you built that's so great?
Where did you get this premise from?
This quote heavily implies pets are bad for adults. Maybe it wasn't your intent.
By explicitly calling out that "[they] are wonderful for children" you are implicitly calling into question their value for adults. Whether that was your intention or not, it's certainly how I read your statement.
On r/poveryfinance and similar subreddits, one can always find someone complaining that they're about to become homeless because they can't afford rent, begging others to please tell them what line item can be cut from their budget to make it work, the conceit being that they consider every item essential. Mixed in among the electrical and water and costs of commuting to work will be $100/month for dog food or cat litter or whatever.
Not only is there no value there, there is, quite often, anti-value. And this is just the quantifiable stuff, these people follow their dogs around picking up their feces with their hands.
I think the only entity sabotaging the environment is we humans. Nature deals with what it's given by adapting. I do think the baby carriages are hilarious, unless it's a geriatric pet.
The issue is.. pets are still pets. And to your point, unbehaved dog can be dangerous to its immediate surrounding. I won't go into details, but our dog is very protective of our kid, so there are places I will not take it ( or at least not without precautions ).. and this is what I see less and less: responsible behavior.
But I will say this, dog was a great training for a kid, when it came for us, because we saw some very similar issues repeat themselves.
The issue is what it has always been: people.
What I’m really poking at here in the joke behind the rant sort of way is a suspicion, a conspiracy by nature to suppress our reproduction capabilities by slowly not only making us infertile in greater numbers, but steering us towards adopting pets instead of humans as a prank, to make us see the animals we are in an animal kingdom.
Your dog can be cute and child-like and playful for its entire life, but is also far more self-sufficient than a human child is in the first year or two of its life.
It’s kind of like you get to be a make-believe parent without any of the difficult parts.
No, he's saying that having a puppy is something a child does, something that's normal for children. If you're doing things that only children should be doing, you are infantilizing yourself (changing your brain in ways that prevents you from growing up properly).
I would not blame nature for this. I'm not particularly conspiracy-minded (humans are generally too stupid for supervillain-style conspiracies), but people did this. The only question at all is whether they did it deliberately, or if it was accidental.
>then I’m afraid the joke is on us.
It's definitely on us.
I’m very disappointed to see such wide adoption of pets, especially dogs, as “replacements” of children in adult lives. I do not think it’s healthy for adults to do this because it infantilizes the adult. It is actually very sad, almost pitiful to see it happen. I think pets are wonderful for children because it helps them to develop a connection with living beings that aren’t humans, to see emotions are a universal trait.
More frequently I see now grown people wheeling their dogs in baby carriages. If this is some cosmic-scale humor by nature because we have overpopulated the planet and it’s intentionally sabotaging the environment, then I’m afraid the joke is on us.