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).
People who grow up even on small, non-factory farms see these animals as products for sale or economic assets, not companions. And even the dogs and cats are likely to be utilized for work as much as companionship.
You don't have to go a hundred years - most non-western societies look at western fascination with dogs and pets with horror, especially when couples with low rates of marriage, population collapse etc.
Dogs took advantage of this situation and they evolved to hijack our paternal and maternal instincts. Now there is selection pressure. But note dogs reproduce much much faster than humans so this will be an evolutionary arms race where dogs get cuter and humans become less interested in dogs. The first round comes when the people who have dogs instead of kids fail to reproduce. Also Expect an increase in dog allergies over time.
They reproduce faster then us so puppies are able to get cuter then babies over generations and thus they are out competing us.
That's why they're called "breeds", because humans bred them.
They're bred for cuteness, violence, but mostly they're bred for profit.
The "pet industry" is a rapid growth segment of the economy. If a pet is "part of the family", then isn't the "pet industry" basically a slave trade?
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.
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 are people not building too that you think they should? What have you built that's so great?
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The parent-child relationship is asymmetric in ways that are often not as visible to the child as they are a parent. There's a reason why for generations, parents have been responding to their childrens' arguments with "when you're a parent, you'll understand".
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.
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.
We absolutely don't deserve them.
With no cognitive dissonance, I can also recognize that some dogs can be dangerous, and in extreme cases, need to be put down. However, I would point out that the vast majority of misbehaved dogs can and should be trained out of their bad behavior, so it's nearly always their owners' responsibilities.
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.
Third places and opportunities to meet people are greatly reduced because everything's taken over by venture capital chains and so expensive, and even if you meet someone the odds of the two of you making enough money to afford to raise a child is low.
If you have that money, you're probably educated enough to see that life for your child will be significantly worse than life for you right now - the rise of authoritarianism, climate change, the active ongoing destruction of American economic power and soft political power, the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, disinformation causing massive chunks of the country to oppose science, education, and other things, discrimination based on gender and race....we're in for some very hard times and it takes a certain mindset to decide that you want to subject a child you love to all of it.
It's not the dogs.
Look it up yourself. This is not a political issue. This is a logistical one and it is highly verified through science.
The anthem of people spewing bullshit across the internet for 30 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
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.
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.
You know what we all need? Another article about LLMs.
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.
dtagames•3h ago
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.
donnachangstein•3h ago
Don't think scare quotes are appropriate here. Pits are problem dogs; they are the violent schizophrenics of the dog world. Hope you reconsider your stance every time some child gets his face gnawed off by one of these land sharks.
Hrun0•3h ago
I don't think so.
xattt•3h ago
The chances of someone surrendering their dog to which they are bonded after reading a comment is unlikely. The chances of someone with the opposite opinion adopting a pitbull are similar.
micromacrofoot•3h ago
We don't have enough data to be conclusive one way or the other, but if you look at the occurrence of strays and breed ownership by socioeconomic status, pit bull breeds are also very high on these lists.
This tracks with human data to some extent: people from lower socioeconomic groups are more often perpetrators and victims of violence.
Looking at breed specific violence and coming to a conclusion about temperament is very similar to looking at race specific graduation rates and coming to a conclusion about intelligence.
2muchcoffeeman•3h ago
micromacrofoot•46m ago
there are multiple other factors (social, socioeconomic) that are a better predictor of behaviors that can also be applied to humans
D13Fd•2h ago
Why not? There are breeds that are taller or shorter, high-energy or low-energy, great hunters or awful hunters, and so on. And it’s not a mystery why some breeds got this way: they were specifically bred for it.
micromacrofoot•2h ago
there are dozens of breeds in each of these categories — we don't have a single breed of dog that's 5x faster than all the others
recursivedoubts•2h ago
https://www.statista.com/chart/15446/breeds-of-dog-involved-...
I think you should have to be able to deadlift 350 lbs to own either.
psunavy03•3h ago
recursivedoubts•2h ago
To be honest I think that's what attracts many inappropriate owners to them.
Two pit stories:
I saw a fat guy walking a relatively small pit and took my dogs off to the side, about 20 feet away to let them pass. The pit pulled out of his (inappropriately fastened) muzzle backwards (they are smart dogs) and took a dead no-bark run at my terrier. I had my 35 lb terrier in the air and kicked that dog as hard as I could in the side to get the situation under control.
Our neighbor had a BIG pit named Thor (big guy, he could control the dog, but kept him leashed out front.). Thor got off leash once and came over and messed w/our goats. We had one goat (the smallest) who we kept horns on and Thor found out the hard way that that goat wasn't going down w/o a fight. Thor survived but didn't mess w/the goats any more after that.
Again, I like most of the pits I've met, but I see a lot of irresponsible owners.
ivraatiems•58m ago
You: "How dare you do this well intentioned, possibly dangerous thing?! Also, let me insult the animals you love!"
What is even a little bit constructive about your post? If you want the parent to change why would you write like this?