I believe there are a few things leading many people to choose pets instead of children to fulfill their desire to nurture:
1. The trauma theory of psychology.
Pop psychology today seems to assume that babies are born perfectly mentally healthy, except for any genetic mental illnesses they inherited from their parents. Then at some point, if they're unlucky, they experience some sort of trauma, often at the hands of their parents. That trauma inflicts a mental illness on them. They can treat it with therapy and/or meds, but the assumption is that the illness is irrevocable. (Don't believe me? The next time you're talking to a friend and they bring up therapy or mental health medication, ask them when they think they'll be cured and can stop.)
The implication here is that as a parent, you've got basically nowhere to go but down with regards to your kid's mental health. If you are yourself perfectly mentally healthy and pass on no predispositions to your kid, and you parent them flawlessly 24/7 for eighteen years and dodge every possible trauma, then congrats you didn't fuck them up. Anything less than that and you're a bad parent. Which leads to...
2. Impossible parenting standards.
Media is constantly filled with all of the various ways a parent can do a bad job. Start the car moving down the driveway before they have their seatbelt on? Bad parent. Let them walk to the park on their own and risk being abducted? Bad parent. Give them access to junk food? Bad parent. Don't put them in enough extracurricular activities to pad their college application letter a decade from now? Bad parent. Too many extracurricular activities so they don't have enough free time in which to learn initiative? Bad parent.
It is unending and demoralizing the ways in which parents are made to constantly feel they are inadequate. When I was a kid, if another kid fell playing and broke their arm, it was just "OK, kids get hurt." Today, it's "Why did you let them do that?" Parents have never spent more time with their children than they do today, but our culture still tells us it's not enough. Or, if it does, they tell us it's too much.
Mix that with the previous point, and having a kid with any mental health challenges is not just a tragedy but your fault as a parent.
3. Long-term pessimism.
I know many people who truly do believe the world is fucked because of climate change and politics. Not only do they not believe any potential children of theirs would be raised in a world worse than they one they grew up in, they don't even have faith that world will be functionally habitable at all.
Best case, they believe their children may thrive only because they happen to be born into privilege while other children in poorer locations will suffer catastrophically from climate change. So the best outcome they can imagine is a profound failing of moral justice.
Meanwhile, consider pets:
1. Rescued from trauma.
Most pet owners get their pets from shelters. The animal may actually have had trauma before being adopted, but the owner wasn't morally responsible. Instead, they are the rescuer that saved the animal from further trauma. If the animal bounces back and has great behavior, then it's a testament to the amazing resilence of animals and the benefits of compassionate ownership. If the animal always has behavioral issues, well it's not their fault they were traumatized and what a good owner they have to take care of them in spite of those challenges.
2. High but meetable standards
Standards for pet ownership are certainly high here too. Long gone are the days of putting the dog in a doghouse in the backyard and giving them a scoop out of the giant cheap bag of Alpo every day. Pets are expected to be fed healthy food, kept inside and safe, given good vet care, and lots of interaction and enrichment.
Those standards are high but attainable. You can just do those things and feel like a good pet owner. And the pet will certainly make you feel like a good pet owner. Their expectations are low and it's easy to exceed them.
3. Shorter life span
If you believe the world is doomed, then a living being that will never outlive you and have to figure out how to make its without your support is a blessing. You don't have to feel guilty about the fact that in a thousand tiny ways, you contributed to climate change that will end up harming a loved one decades from now.
I love dogs, I had dogs as a kid, I have a dog now. I don't, nor have I ever thought my dog is a replacement for children. My dog doesn't hold me back from forming human relationships. Yet there is this weird online value judgement (never actually seen it IRL) that owning a dog is somehow a betrayal of the human race.
Delete all social media, and, if you can, choose to have absolutely no dealings with the big tech industry
I've noticed this too. I try not to use Reddit very much, if at all, but when I do this sentiment is one that sticks out now. It's not everywhere, but you can certainly find an undercurrent of anti-dog, "downfall of western civilization," "Children of Men was so prescient" sentiment in the comments of some posts featuring dogs that make it to r/all.
There were many factors that went into my wife and I deciding not to have kids, but dogs being a replacement for children was not one of them. We made that decision years before we got our first dog.
I did a lengthy paid survey a few years back that was sponsored by a VC owned pet supply company in my country. All the questions were to non pet owners, or former reluctant non owners and was aimed at getting data on how much pet ownership improved your life. I have seen the results of this survey paraphased and published in every single major news outlet in my country ('science says pet good!'). Pets are consumption, companies run PR campaigns to promote consumption of their product.
I think the politicisation has come because you can't now criticise the pet or having of pets without it being seen as an attack on the owners whole lifestyle and personal image, for those who have become dog dads/dog mums. But for people who do take a position against it, they have to be willing to make that attack on someone's image to get their point across.
I dont want pets, I think a not insignificant # of people have them for the wrong reasons (like the above comment on trauma rescuing), I think over consumption of pet at a macro level is bad, but I like all the individual dogs and cats I know in my life.
Urban / rural people like to keep dogs. Poor / rich people like keeping dogs. Liberal / conservative people like keeping dogs. Young / old people like keeping dogs.
Huh, never seen or heard of this. I'd put it down to "weird online thing", yeah.
we have a good relationship with the children we raised, along with their children. Our dog, however, is always with us and it just feels good to watch after her. We don't consider her a child, just a very good, non-verbal friend.
There is certainly an imbalance between dog and human authority/autonomy/agency, but that is not the only dynamic in the relationship. And it’s not necessarily the defining dynamic, nor is it consistently applicable.
Whether she understands how we feel about her isn't the point or the definition. She seems happy and doesn't live in any kind of fear, and that makes all the difference to us. Anything else is just picking fly scat out of pepper.
As a lifelong rescuer of pit bulls and other "problem" dogs, I can see how that role I've picked for myself aligns and contrasts with how others view human-dog relationships.
Back in "the day" these people would get into crappy marriages and pop out a few kids before ultimately getting divorced or just be single moms. While it's nice that they're not doing that I think the more interesting angle is the picture of how the economic reality has changed over the generations.
As in many things, most people are willing to ignore any aspect that is not what's in their face, and appealing to them.
There are many other aspects to the thoughtless use of other animals to assuage a human's mental illness.
One of the main ones is projection: the animal can't speak, or otherwise precisely express themselves. Into this silence, the human is able to inject whatever narrative they desire. This leads to people claiming that the animal is much more responsive to their needs, and provides greater solace than another human. This solace is purely in the mind of the beholder. No one knows what the dog is thinking, therefore it's thinking exactly what we want it to think.
Another aspect of the entire pet issue, that I haven't seen otherwise mentioned in the comments, is the disruption to the public peace caused by many dogs. I have seen a couple of comments about dog shit, which is a major problem, but noise is also a significant issue.
Both of these are primarily the fault of negligent owners, which are the overwhelming majority of modern US pet owners.
Puppies wean from around 3-8 weeks and aren't adopted until 8-10 weeks, well after they are weaned. This is obviously true because when people adopt puppies, they aren't feeding them milk replacement out of a bottle. The puppy is eating solid food.
My wife fosters kittens, and she frequently gets a litter along with the mother cat. In most cases, the mom cat completely loses interest in the kittens well before they are ready to be adopted out. Often, the mom cat leaves and goes up for adoption before the kittens do because she is no longer taking care of them at all.
The problem isn't so much having to deal with the dogs that have already been manufactuered, they should be supported as well as possible, the problem is stopping the ongoing manufacture of new animals as products.
If you continue this idea, then the dogs we consider "normal" all suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. The dogs we consider aggressive show the behavior that is actually logical and relatable.
This is why I truly believe AI companions are going to be the downfall of civilization. Now you don't even need to project what you want them to think. The AI will just actually say what you want it to.
Declining birth rates are clearly a response to the deterioating economic conditions of most people. Stagnant real wages, skyrocketing costs, ever-more inaccessible housing and so on. Housing debt, student debt, medical debt. The cost of childcare can reach $3000/month per child. If you want your child to have the best opportunities, it may well cost $1 million or more between all those costs to raise a child. At a time when people can barely provide for themselves.
Of course pets are surrogate children for some people. And even that's being ruined by capitalism as private equity moves into the vet space to squeeze every last dollar from people.
Another aspect to this is social control. One reason Western societies have been relatively stable is the method of control is treats, basically. Social media, pets, smartphones, etc all mollify the masses. In more totalitarian societies, the threat of violence is a more typical method of control. Think of something like the Stasi in East Germany.
The profit motive is destroying the treats. If you're on the verge of homelessness and can barely feed yourself, skyrocketing costs of pet ownership are a real issue. We're rapidly approaching a point where people think they'll never be able to retire and really have nothing to live for.
Rather than the ultra-wealthy being slightly less wealthy so the rest of society, which is necessary for their wealth to exist, can have something good in their lives, we're instead becoming increasingly oppressive. Over-policing, militarizing police, crushing protests (as per this last weekend in LA), etc.
Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. And to think, all a lot of people need to be happy is a roof over their head, not having to have 3 jobs and being able to have a dog.
You know what we all need? Another article about LLMs.
It is no surprise that people are fans of them, for a variety of reasons.
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.
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.
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.
Where did you get this premise from?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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 thought that was ridiculous because these are just animals. It sucks when they die but it’s not the end of the world.
Another car nearby killed a little child and her father and that one was much more horrific to me.
But now it makes sense: to these people the two incidents were equivalent. I suppose that is normal, what with all the stories of animals caring for the young of other animals. Neotenic characteristics seem to have cross-species impact.
Very cool. Thank you for sharing this.
You see this in cinema. We're relieved that the cat survives in Alien, even though we just watched several humans die horribly. And we kind of feel like John Wick's Roaring Rampage of Revenge is justified after the Russian mafia kills his dog.
This never gets reconciled with the reality of factory farms and mass meat production. It’s certainly a type of cognitive dissonance. In a hundred years we might look back on the now with horror (more generalized anyway).
You can feel that way, and that's fine, but people are allowed to decide what they do or don't find precious. They are allowed to rank species and members within a species in order of most to least precious. There's no inherent rule that all life must be valued the same. Would you not be more sad about a human child dying over a cow? Would you not be more sad about a loved one dying about a random person you don't know a few thousand miles away?
They reproduce faster then us so puppies are able to get cuter then babies over generations and thus they are out competing us.
If you had to choose between a family member dying or a totally random person dying, even though objectively they're both just humans, you're going to kill the random person, because you have feelings and emotions, and they are part of the equation. For the same reason you'd kill the random person, people would kill the cow, and want to save the dog.
I once watched a woman hold her little dog over the glass at the pizza bar in Whole Foods. Was waiting for the dog to drop a free sausage link onto the pizza below.
Placing dogs into shopping carts is another one. Dogs rub their dirty buttholes on the same surfaces where you later place your fruits and vegetables.
But make no mistake, they're still animals and are not predictable. I would never bring a dog with me outside to do anything other than go for a walk, always on a leash. They really dont belong in public spaces. I've seen and heard too many stories of dogs suddenly not being the perfect precious animal their owner claims and it bites or attacks another animal or person. Then when they do the owners insist the victim must have done something wrong and take zero responsibility.
No, they treat them as better than people.
Because in their value system, animals are moral objects but not moral subjects. By that, I mean that actions done to animals can have moral weight. If you take a sick kitten and nurse it back to health, you are a good person. If you kick a puppy, you are a bad person.
But the animal itself (according to this culture) carries no moral responsibility. If a dog bites someone, it's not an evil dog. It's not the dog's fault. It was just raised poorly, or traumatized as a puppy, or the owner should have kept it leashed better, etc.
Thus animals are always morally pure, but people can be bad people. I kind of get where the value system is coming from: animals really are on the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to power and agency, so it does make sense to think of them as mostly receivers of moral actions. But some people take that really far.
This seems a bit extreme. I think dog owners have a responsibility to make sure their animal is trained and able to be controlled near people, but outdoor public spaces (parks/plazas, cafes with outdoor seating whose management is dog friendly), seem fine.
However, the responsibility for your dog's behavior extends even outside of public space. I was bitten by a dog in the lobby of a friend's building. The dog was leashed and presumably just returning from a walk. Later, I heard that some inspections in that building had to be rescheduled because a dog bit one of the inspectors while inside one of the condos (not sure if it was the same dog). Being in a non-public space in no way reduces the owner's responsibility.
I’m in tears.
I'm broke. As much as it pains me to be without a pet, I dont want to take on additional responsibilities if I am incapable of sufficiently giving the care these living beings need and deserve.
I've considered fostering, as they pay for many things the animals need. Perhaps in the future.
They drain resources and get free care while offering no benefit other than satisfying maternal urges which were designed to work on human babies. Puppies are 100 percent part of the reason for the westernized world’s population problem.
I know dozens of couples who were pairs of high earners but one quit their job to stay at home with their child because it was cheaper than paying for child care, but sure, tell yourself it's the dogs.
The economy IS a factor.
But sinking resources into a dog that offers no evolutionary or biological benefit IS ALSO a factor.
There is no other way to look at this. You are committing an act of irrationality if you refuse to see dogs from a biological perspective.
Porn sits in the same area. Hijacking biological instincts to prevent reproduction.
We are looking at multiple causal sources that prevent us from having more children. In the same way men use porn to assuage our sexual urges, many women use dogs to help assuage their maternal instincts. Don’t let your emotions cloud your logic.
This article did not deserve to get flagged simply for offering their own perspective.
If a dog keeps depression at bay, someone could possibly avoid having their brain chemistry permanently altered by owning a dog.
There are even working breeds with many different purposes. It's not all black lab and American Eskimo.
Isn't "100 percent" redundant here? In general X is either part of the reason for Y or X is not part of the reason for Y. I can't think of any example where X might be say 87% part of the reason for Y.
Saying that it has not influenced the population problem is equivalent to not living in reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
Look it up yourself. This is not a political issue. This is a logistical one and it is highly verified through science.
