I believe I said it insulted me, not annoyed me. And it insulted me in the same way that it would have if, after I recounted the story of my daughter in the hospital, she replied, “well, what’s the big deal. You must not really love her at all, since you allowed her to injure herself”.
The point is, in my opinion there’s such a big difference between my love for my child and (even though she doesn’t realize it), her love for her pet, that she might as well have discounted the love I feel for my child by saying what I quoted above. Well, not exactly, but practically.
I’m not discounting the fact that pet owners love their pets. But I’ve spoken to many people who had a pet first, thought that the love they felt for the pet was the be-all and end-all of the emotion, then had kids and they realized that they didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.
Lissa, would you not think it strange if you told someone that your mother/father/significant other had just died in some horrible accident and their response was, “Oh, I understand completely, my pet earthworm just died.”?
As the owner of two wonderful mutts, that I bragged about constantly, and now the parent of a six month old HUMAN, I have to say the comparison is ridiculous. Dogs and cats are further along the scale towards a child (the scale being earthworms at one end and humans on the other), but they’re still not humans.
If someone owns a pet, and doesn’t have children, I will certainly accept that they love that pet more than anything else they have ever had. If they still claim that after they’ve had a child, then they’re in need of some psycological testing.
It depends on the person and it depends on culture. In the Victorian era, girls formed very passionate, intense friendships which through modern eyes seem almost lesbian in nature. If you read the letters, you’ll see references to physical affection like embraces and kisses, but these relationships were almost always strictly non-sexual. At the same time, new mothers were cautioned not to get too attatched to their infants because there was a good chance that they’d die. Mary Lincoln’s behavior after her children died was thought of as bizarre, but today her “excessive grief” would be considered normal. Even further back, in the Tudor era, it was considered by some scholars to be downright harmful to display any affection to children for fear it would stunt their moral development. Today, people in some countries sell their children into the sex trade while others mortgage their homes to pay for their pets’ medical care.
What all of this says to me is that there’s not really a “natural” or “normal” way to love. We have societal expectations of who we’re supposed to love, but no certain innate sense of it. Some people have no real emotional attatchements to anyone. I mentioned that chimp mothers’ brains have been shown to flood with “love chemicals” when they cuddle their infants, but there are some who cast them aside without a second thought. (Just like humans.) It’s not that they’re necessarily sick or damaged, but that they don’t feel the same emotion as everyone else.
I guess it just never occured to me to judge whether I thought a person’s emotions were correct for the situation. If someone tells me they’re grieving or angry or experiencing love, I pretty much accept it at face value. When I used to work at the battered women’s shelter, I believed them when they said they loved or missed the men who abused them, even though loving someone like that with the same devotion would be utterly foreign to me. I did what I always think appropriate when someone expresses emotion: try to offer whatever comfort and support that I can. As my grandfather would have put it, “Someone’s hurtin’. It don’t really matter why.”
You’re talking about the social aspects of love, not the emotion itself. When you cuddle your baby, what are you feeling at that exact moment? Likely, you’re not thinking about education and your ambitions for them. You’re probably feeling a warm, happy senation, and are getting tactile pleasure out of kissing a soft baby head or just breathing in your child’s smell. THAT is what I’m talking about-- the actual emotion of love, not the complicated social structure built around it.
If you were undergoing deep grief because of it, no I wouldn’t be offended or put off by it. It’s human nature to commiserate and when someone tells us that they’re experiencing a deep emotion, it’s natural for us to supply an example of our own experiences as an example of our empathy. Again, it’s not the object of the affection but the emotion itself.
Maybe love isn’t love. The love people have for their spouses or significant others differs from the love they have for their kids. The love people have for their parents differs from the love they have with their best friends. My love for humanity is a different kind of love that I have for my family. A mother can love her hot-tempered, criminal son in a different way than she loves her quiet, obediant, responsible daughter. If love is merely chemical-induced signaling at the right synapses, then we must explain how a person can love in so many different ways.
I have two cats that I love a whole lot. Everyone who knows me knows that I love my cats because I’m always talking about them (even though I try not to ). I don’t love them in the same way that I love my family, not because they aren’t important to me, but because our relationship is different. The bonds between family and the bonds between humans and animals are not comparable. Not because animals are “less”, but because animals and humans cue on different signals, use different nonverbal and verbal languages, and simply perceive the world in vastly different ways. They are aliens to us. We are alien to them.
I can’t explain why I love my pets. They don’t do anything tangible for me. Their upkeep diverts energy, time, and money that could be spent on more productive things. And yet, I can’t explain why people love their babies. Babies don’t do anything tangible. Objectively, they take up more energy, time, and money than they give back. People don’t love babies because of their potential. If that were the case, people wouldn’t love their profoundly handicapped children. People love their stillborn babies…how can this possibly be! If you just found out that your teenager was killed and someone expressed empathy by talking about their stillborn fetus, would you be annoyed? If we can rank love for animals on a scale, why not expand it to humans?
Love is a complex thing. I don’t think it’s a chemical brew. Nor do I think it’s understandable enough to allow for classification and ranking.
Pets may not stop peeing and pooping everywhere, but they never want the car keys, never talk incessantly on the phone, never demand money, never eat you out of house and home, nor act so rudely in public you want to disown them for several years.
Again, you seem to be defending a different question than you asked in the OP. Here you seem to be arguing that a person can love a pet, and their love shouldn’t be questioned. I have absolutely no argument with that. People can and should love their pets.
If you reread your OP, you’ll find that you posed a completely different question. Again, people should feel entirely free to love their pets as much as they want, and shouldn’t feel compelled to compare their love for their pet with anyone else’s love for anything else. Just feel it and enjoy it and don’t worry if it is the same as that someone else might feel for a child.
If that were true, then I would feel the same about every baby I cuddle, whether it’s my baby or not. But as any parent can tell you–especially a parent who doesn’t really like babies in general–holding your own kid is entirely different than holding another one. You spend lots of time staring into each other’s eyes and learning to communicate and stuff. And all of what you, Lissa, call “complicated social structure” is an integral part of the love you feel when you hold your baby; it’s a total (albeit background and unconscious) feeling made up of all the daily interactions, the memories, the hopes and dreams for the future, and everything else. By no means is it “aw, fuzzy!” and nothing else. “Aw, fuzzy!” is what you feel with someone else’s baby.
And again, I agree with Hentor’s statement. Of course people love pets, and that’s great. The problem is when they compare their love for their pet with a parent’s love for a child; and IME, when those people become parents, the lightbulb usually goes on and they realize the extent of the silliness of the comparison, unless there’s something wrong.
One can love a painting, a dog, a car, an antique, a home and so on…each kind of love is different.
My dog is part of my family…I would not take one million dollars tax free to have someone put him humanely to sleep in the next day or so.
But a love for my wife or any of my children exceeds that which I could feel for any animal…Unless my child turned out to be a real schmuck…then love for him/her would diminish below or equal to love for an animal in my family.
My love is much, much more powerful and real than your love. Unless you have loved the ones I’ve loved, your idea of love is just a pale imitation of my specialness, and I’ll thank you not to insult me by comparing it.
I understand that for some people they do love their pets more than they love anything else in the world. I never loved any pet as much as my spouse or family and once I had children; I loved them more than anything else in the world.
My little cat Velcro seemed like the best cat in the world, I loved her more than any other animal I have ever had, but this love really does pale compared to the love I have for my kids. I do not get insulted by people saying how they love their pets as much as their kids, but I do privately find myself thinking, “you just do not know, you really just do not know”.
The closest I can come to it are these questions. It also assumes you love your Mom or Dad and they are still alive.
If you could only save your parent or your pet, which would, you save?
Then ask a parent:
If you could only save your parent or your child, who would you save?
I assume that for most people the answer would be Parent to the first question and Child to the second. I understand there are plenty of exceptions, but most people would probably put their parent ahead of their beloved pet and most people would put their child ahead of their parent. The good news in this, is most grand parents would probably tell you to save the child and thus relieve your guilt a little, where as the pet will just wonder why you abandoned it.
My cat, Tibby has been in my life for 12 years. From the time he was a wee kitten, I’ve loved him very much. For many years, I’ve heard people debate whether one could love an animal to the same degree as one loves a child. Naively, I always maintained that one could love a cherished pet every bit as much as a child. I could not fathom a love stronger than that which I felt for my Tibby-cat. This seemed to make perfect sense to me. Then, I had my first child, a lovely girl. She was sweet and adorable from day one. Then, I remembered the old yarn, “you always love your children equally, no matter how different they are”, and I thought, “impossible! There is no way on earth that I could love another child as much as I love this one.” And, then I had my second child, another girl. This one was completely different from the first: more naughty than nice; a real handful, in fact.
I’ve learned a lot in the years since the birth of my children. Now, with my raggedy ol’ cat and my two dissimilar daughters, I can finally answer the question about pet love vs. child love and the question about loving one child as much as another. Speaking authoritatively from experience, I can say, unequivocally:
I love my good girl more than my bad girl, but I love my cat most of all.
Apparently, I was right all along.
Here’s an example that I think demonstrates the difference between loving your pets and loving your children, while demonstrating the intensity of both:
During Hurricane Katrina, there were many people who refused to leave their pets, and stayed at home to try and protect them, despite dire warnings, and some of those people died - trying to save their pets.
At the same time, there were people in New Orleans who left their equally loved pets behind knowing they’d probably die, so that they could get their children to safety.
Both are equally valid types of love. But children take you to a new level of sacrifice and attachment. They are not identical. But they are hard to tell apart until push comes to shove.
I’m not saying that at all. Humans, like all social creatures, are more likely to have emotional responses to members of their “pack”, especially their offspring.
When you hug your child, are you doing it because hugging them makes you happy, or because you’re conciously calculating that the gesture of affection will make them more bonded to you? Yes, memories of prior interractions always play a subliminal role, but we hug and kiss because we enjoy it.
Raising a child is much more complicated than a person’s relationship with a pet. Complication, however, doesn’t change your seratonin levels.* Emotion* does. What I’m saying is that this base feeling– this senation of warmth, happiness and even mild euphoria that we define as the feeling of love can be achieved from other sources and is not necessarily any less intense because of it.
To say “I love my dog or cat as much as other people love their children,” is a fallacy, too. You can never know how much another individual feels and thus can’t say that your emotions are the same as theirs. But I think it’s equally erroneous to claim* that people can’t love their pets as much as another person loves their child for the same reason.
I do that a lot. I’m still exploring my own opinions on this issue, and thus I haven’t reached a point of consistency. If it’s confusing or frustrating to others, I apologize. I’m just throwing out ideas as they occur to me to see what others think.
*This is a general statement, not directed at you.
Indeed. In fact we need only look around to see people’s “love” for others/animals to be wildly across the board. We see all too often people who horribly mistreat their children and/or pets. We see others who are bonkers over them.
I have sadly been witness to more than a few people bringing their pets in to be euthanized. Some drop them off with barely a blink and others are in obvious anguish. I’ll never forget the scream of despair one woman let out as her cat was put to sleep in her arms or the horror on the 80+ year old woman’s face who accidentally paralyzed her dog and had to put it down.
The love for a pet can be profound. I will say however that in my experience people tend to bounce back from the loss of a pet faster than they do from a child or other human loved one. I have yet to see someone who still bears the emotional scars of a lost pet years later but I have seen it on people. I know people who lost their child over a decade ago and while they are normal, happy people today you can still see a haunted expression behind their eyes that never goes away (hard to describe but unmistakable).
I think we simply have more investment, usually, in our human loved ones than we do our pets. So much more effort is (generally) put into a parent/child relationship than that of a pet that the loss can’t help but be deeper and more profound.
And it is hard to weigh the love of one thing over another. I know my parents love their children and if they had to choose whether to save each other or their children out of a burning house they’d go for the kids. That said at the end of my dad’s life while he wanted to see his children it was his wife he most wanted at his side at the end. Just a different sort of love and one he found more comforting at the end.
So who’s to say? Do not minimize the love for a pet. It really can be quite strong. I know I would risk my life for my dog if it came to it.
I’ve never personally met anyone who was devastated years later by the loss of a pet; however, they certainly do exist. I’ve heard of counsellors helping such people.
It does happen. We have a Pet Loss Support Hotline number that we give out at work. I remember in a companion animal class (no cite, sorry) from the people who used that resource it took an average of a year and a half to stop mourning their pets according to their survey.
I’ve always been quite scared of people who equate their love for a pet, to the love for another human. Particularly those who use terms like “fur babies”, or in other way equate a domesticated animal in their keeping to an actual child of their own.
I’m sorry, but the level of bonding between a human and an animal is far less than that between a parent and child. Reasons for this are numerous. The level of nurturing you have to provide for a child is far greater, and there’s nothing like being responsible for someones life to make you build an emotional investment in them. The demands that a child places on you are great, but really this just demonstrates the leverage they have over you. The emotional highs and lows are impossible to quantify in language, the cliches are horribly correct: the first time they say Dada or Mama your heart will melt; the first time they get a bad fever and you spend a night at the local hospital will scare you like you won’t believe; you watch their first steps with amazement.
As they grow up, there will no doubt be many an argument and problem, but that no more stops you from loving a child than you stop loving your partner when you row with them. The parts of yourself that you see in them may infuriate you (as the most noticable ones are usually your personal flaws - you just know where they got that stubborn streak from) but they are also very endearing. In most cases, you will have as many moments to be proud of them as you will to be angry with them.
Contrast with the relationship you have with a pet. Communication is limited beyond any meaningful comparison. Yes, you know when they’re hungry, and when they want out, but you’re not too likely to be telling them a bed time story or explaining why ice cream is soft and ice isn’t. Interaction is also on completely different level. Sure, you can take a dog for a walk or jogging or whatever, but you’re not too likely to build a treehouse together or work on some homework/project/whatever. You can most certainly build up great affection and love for a pet, but there’s never going to be the same depth of relationship that you can enjoy with another human, nothing like the same level of mutual experience and growth.
). I don’t love them in the same way that I love my family, not because they aren’t important to me, but because our relationship is different. The bonds between family and the bonds between humans and animals are not comparable. Not because animals are “less”, but because animals and humans cue on different signals, use different nonverbal and verbal languages, and simply perceive the world in vastly different ways. They are aliens to us. We are alien to them.