I don’t care how much or little you love your child. I do care that my feelings are thrown aside as lesser however.
There have been thousands of people who have proven they would murder for a few dollars, a job or a six pack. Why would you doubt that there would be people who would murder for a beloved pet?
Also, the original question was kill for, not murder.
For you, apparently that is true. I will echo Ms Whatsit - I cannot fathom why you care what levels I put it on. Unlike pets, there is no threat that you will not be able to have your children, or have as many as you want, or take them anywhere you want. What do you care what I feel?
You’re drawing a false dichotomy. My dog was a good companion and I did my best to take care of her and make sure she was happy; I never treated her as an “accessory”. I cried when she died. But I got over it: she was a dog, not a person and certainly not a child.
Reminds me of an old joke about how if you tell people that you love your dog, they’ll say, “oh, that’s sweet!” But try telling them that you’re in love with your dog . . .
I’m not sure what you mean by “bingos,” but in any case, I apologize if you were insulted by my post…I truly did not mean it that way.
In answer to your wondering if the majority of parents love their children as much as you love your pets…you do realize that the vast majority of parents are not abusive, right? I’m sure you love your pets mre than SOME parents love their kids…some people don’t care much about their kids. But the MAJORITY? I sincerely doubt it.
It’s interesting to me that you mention that kids don’t give parents unconditional love. The fact that parents pretty much have to give unconditional love even when they don’t get it back demonstrates the depth of the love. I doubt most people would put up with dogs if the dog gave them the same kind of crap you get from a teenager.
Don’t misrepresent my posts.
I have stated twice now that I am a pet owner and I loved my pets. I love my current bird, but I loved my cat more as an individual and a companion.
I do understand the love of animals, what you keep failing to understand is that the love of a child is a different aspect of love. As someone who has experienced both, I can see that difference (as has every other parent and pet owner responding to this thread), as someone who has *not *experienced both, you can’t see that difference. Pretending the difference doesn’t exist does not change reality, it just means you’re ignoring reality.
Cats, though, give you exactly that kind of crap.* But they don’t borrow the car.
*“Feed me!” “Brush me!” “Now leave me alone!” “It’s none of your business where I’ve been.” “This…is not a mouse…and I’m not bringing it in the house.”
Your feelings belong to you and are not a box of trash that someone else can pick up and throw away. And anyway, I think it is quite clear that love for pet is different from love for child. A lot of people would probably say their love for their child is greater than their love for their pet. You disagree in your personal situation. So what? Someone else saying that they love a child more than they could love a pet doesn’t change your relationship with your pets, does it? Let it go, man. (Woman? Whichever.)
Oh, if the question is, “Are there people who are totally insane and will kill other people for stupid/bad reasons?” then obviously the answer is yes. I am surprised that you want to equate your feelings about your pet with the feelings of someone who would kill for a six-pack of beer, though.
But are you in that statement not doing the exact same thing? Yes, there is a uniform repsonse from the parents here, but does the small sampling of responses as opposed to the much larger number of parents and/or pet owners invalidate by its’ own existance the feelings that she has? I say no. How do YOU assume you know her heart or that of any pet owner? It isn’t that no one believes what the parents are saying about the love being different, I believe and hope it is, what’s being objected to I suspect is the idea that the love you possess for another living being cannot possibly be as strong or as true as another for theirs. I as a pet owner have not the right to trivialize the love you have, nor do you as a parent have the right to trivialize mine, yet this is what’s happening, or at least seems to be. It cuts to the quick, I think for some because, as other examples in this thread, it’s OK in my mind if I can’t fly a 747, but if the very base emotion of love is reduced or marginalized because I do not want or can not have children, it has an absolute impact.
I’m interested in exploring this answer.
Take one of your pets. A madman with a gun tells you it’s you or it. Which do you choose?
Say it’s the pet or the one relative you love the most who is not your child. Which do you choose?
Say it’s your pet or 20 strangers who you have no reason to believe deserve to die. Which do you choose?
I’m also curious, if I may be a bit morbid, as to what you plan to do when one of your dogs or cats dies, which unless you are very old is near-certain to happen before you die. If my kid died it would wreck me as a person, and the same could me said of many parents, probably most. How could you own multiple pets and survive that much inevitable grief?
I’ve never had kids. Lost my cat recently; I loved him and miss him every day. But, it doesn’t consume me. I can’t even imagine what losing a child would be like. I know people who have gone through it, and I don’t know how they kept going.
But I don’t think it’s patently offensive; people are just expressing their feelings using their experiential frame of reference.
You’re kidding, right? I sincerely wish this was the level of angst that many parents go through with teens. Just this month in my community, we’re dealing with two cutters, a possible rape, a teen pregnancy scare, an internet dating gone wrong and a diabetic who sent her blood sugar through the roof at an unsupervised party with alcohol. Makes my own kid’s terrible grades and clinical depression this semester seem positively quaint.
That being said, I’ll repeat that one can’t quantify love (nor suffering). The greatest love and responsibility you’ve ever felt in your life is the greatest, and it doesn’t matter what mine is. But what we consistently see (and it’s not just in this thread) is parents who are pet owners who laugh and scoff at their OWN naivete in once thinking their pets were like kids or their own feelings for them identical. I’m sure there are aberrations on both sides - parents who continue to view their pets as children and pet owners who would kill for their animals - but it’s pretty clear to me, from this thread, from articles in parenting magazines, from the laws in our culture, from observing life, that the general way things work for the majority of people is that children trump pets. Such a vast majority that when it happens the other way around, it’s into mental illness or adjustment disorder territory.
She is now saying that parents - as a group - love their children the same or less than she loves her pets.
She is wrong, the vast majority of human writings and experience puts children ahead of pets. It’s not just on this thread, in literature, philosophy and human history, animals come a far second to children. She may think she loves her animals more, but she’s not basing that on experience, just guesswork that flies in the face of objective reality.
How can she know the hearts of all parents? She can’t, but that doesn’t stop her saying that we stop loving our kids when they’re teenagers. She also thinks that the feelings of a parent can be equated to choosing the breeding partners for her animals before she sells the offspring for profit. Dog breeding =/= parenting.
I’ve said throughout that I believe she loves her animals, as I love/d mine, but she is not a parent.
The equating dogs with children or the friend who prattles on about their kids to someone they know has no kids and won’t be able to hold up their end of the conversation? Because really, except for the coworker further up who was a jerk about miscarriage, I can’t see many of these conversations, between parent and pet owner, coming out of the blue.
Uhh, when you grow up with someone, and haven’t seen them since before you had kids, and now you have a 6 year old and a 1 year old, the conversation comes up.
Here is a monkey wrench to throw into the debate…
“Remember” the good old days?
A hundred or two or more years ago, when someone’s child/children were nearly a disposable commodity?
Or heck, thats even the case in some third world countries today.
I think another reason the love for our pets is different than the love for our animals is that when we adopt a pet, we know in our minds that we are going to outlive that animal and thus we keep a certain emotional distance. Not that I don’t love my kitty, but (even though he is young) I’ve mentally prepared myself for losing him one day and have considered what lengths I would go to to prolong his life. A child, on the other hand, is an extension of yourself that you expect to outlive you, and thus there is no emotional reservation.
I have a cat. I really, really love my cat. I don’t delude myself into thinking he loves me back, though he’s a very affectionate and cuddly creature and very demanding of my time. I’ve never really had an experience like this before, caring for something that is dependent on me. Sometimes I feel like I’m not doing a great job and I’ll announce, ‘‘I’m a horrible Cat Mom!’’ I miss him when I’m away.
This in no way means that I think owning a pet is even remotely close to having a child. Some people are really, really intense about their animals, and I don’t get it. I recently made a new friend who was really awesome except she kept interrupting me to play with her kitten. It was a cute kitten, but I cannot conceive of allowing a pet to get in the way of my relationship with a human being. If, for example, my cat somehow began to affect my relationship with my husband, I would get rid of the cat. I have higher priorities than the cat and I don’t even have kids at this point.
I think it can be very offensive to equate the two in certain contexts, such as dealing with the death of a child. As a general rule I don’t think it’s offensive so much as weird and incomprehensible.
Apparently then, you are not the sort of pet owner that I am.
There is a big grey area between abusing ones kids and loving them as much as I love my pets. I just see so many parents that appear unconcerned with what their kids are doing or learning, who they are with, whether they are safe. I’d say that just me being responsible for not squishing a kid happens at least twice a week, so that leads to me wondering how much they really do love their kid.
Well, except when don’t…
Far too many people don’t put up with dogs who haven’t given them any crap at all! OTOH, I have had dogs who came here as adults with some pretty awful habits and some of them stayed for the rest of their lives. One dog, whose death I still have not recovered from after almost five years, came here at four years of age with issues that included biting, yet he was what we call my heart dog. Of course, that was after a lot of work…
I am not misrepresenting your posts, I am responding to what I understood you to say. If you wish to be hostile let me know and I will just ignore your posts since I have better things to do with my time than interact with someone who responds with their feelings rather than their brain.
What you are failing to understand is that simply because you have had a bird and a cat and whatever else, this does not mean that you have necessarily experienced the same depth of feelings that I have had for some of my pets. Therefore, you have not necessarily experienced both.
What you are also failing to understand is that simply because you are a parent and say you have some level of feeling for your child(ren), it means nothing to me. If nothing else, most of the news stories about abused and murdered children include parents wailing about how much they loved that child they abused and/or murdered. Parents, like pet owners, experience a wide range of depth of feelings for their children. You simply saying you love your child(ren) tells me zero about how much.
And finally, why do you care? Are you insecure about the way you feel about your child(ren) to the point that you have to insult pet owners about how they feel?