Add me to the “disagree with the premise” group. Kids are kids and pets are pets; they’re not equivalent, and it’s not an either/or situation. I have kids (who are adults now) and I’ve had dogs and various other pets. Yes, pets require care but it isn’t really comparable to raising a child. Even the most devoted pet owners usually understand that.
However, I have known a couple of people who called their pets “furkids” and insisted that they were the functional equivalent of children. I think that’s dumb and a bit irksome. As I told one of those people: “Let me know when your cat learns to drive and starts pestering you to buy him/her a car.”
I voted disagree with the premise. If acceptable means for the person, then who am I to judge. If it means for society, would not acceptable mean either that people should be forced to have kids or be prevented from having pets if they didn’t have kids? I doubt that was the intention.
I’ve done both, and agree that there is nothing the slightest bit similar to having pets and having kids.
Yeah I think I really messed up the prompt - I think I’ll try one more time with better wording and ask the mods to close this topic. And if the new poll doesn’t work out, oh well.
Yeah, in an ideal world, that’s true. But then again, when a stray cat turns up on your front porch and you tell your kids “Don’t feed him because then he’ll never go away,” they’re pretty much guaranteed not to hear the “Don’t.” So there you are with a cat.
It’s a spin-off from criticisms of Pope Francis’s remarks, and a current Pitting on that subject.
I’m particularly interested in seeing whether there are a lot of people who might answer Question 3 with “Disagree” or “Agree, but only in fringe cases such as mental illness”. That seemed to be the consensus in the Pit but goes against my experience and I needed a reality check. I suspect a few people may agree with Question 4, myself.
So the title question, as I see it, lies between 3. and 4.
Acceptable to the person answering the poll, for Pete’s sake.
As I’ve said when I’ve done a poll, no matter how thoroughly you think it through before you post it, you only find out what’s wrong with your poll after you post it. And then there’s no shortage of nitpicking, criticism, and shoulda-coulda.
Someday someone will post a poll and everyone will say “OMG, that is the finest, most logical, most comprehensive, beautiful, inspiring poll I have ever seen. There’s not one thing that could be done to improve it.” And I’ll be able to get into my college jeans on that day, too.
I have pets because I like animals. I don’t have kids because they’re the worst; the last thing I need is some sponge eating my food and making fun of my tastes in music. And have you ever seen a toddler eat? It’s disgusting.
And posting, as requested by the OP, other comments copied from the other thread:
You (@Max_S) seem in that poll to be conflating “desire to nuture something” with “desire to raise a child.” Plenty of people want to nuture something other than a child; and plenty of people want to nuture children in ways that don’t involve raising one or more of their own.
So that takes out the first two questions.
The third question has partly that problem, and partly the problem of being the wrong way around. Yes, some people adopt pets because they want to nuture something; but that doesn’t mean that they want to nuture a child, let alone to produce or adopt one.
And I can’t answer the fourth in that form, because I have adopted cats and dogs in part because I wanted to nuture them, and at the times I did so I for various reasons did not want to have a child; but I didn’t adopt them because I didn’t want to have a child, and none of the reasons why I didn’t want to have a child were in any way either affecting, or affected by, the reasons why I did want to adopt cats and/or dog.
[Which, I will further add, I would have done even if I had had children. Neither decision was affected by, or dependent on, the other. My need to live with beings who aren’t human is distinct from my need to have social relationships, of whatever sort, with humans.]
The desire or duty to love or nurture is further clarified as being, specifically, to develop a maternal or paternal relationship. There may be other desires to nurture that have nothing to do with maternal/paternal feelings, but these are not relevant to the question.
Question 2.
I asked about “a desire or duty to develop a maternal or paternal relationship by taking on something new to nurture.” Again, there may be desires to develop maternal or paternal relationships which have nothing to do with nurturing. But I’m only asking about the ones that involve developing a maternal relationship through nurturing something new.
I didn’t vote, but I grew up with cats (and a few dogs) ever since I can first remember, and my mom and dad grew up with pets in their respective households as kids, too - even in some cases birds, rabbits, chickens. We just are a family that likes pets (extended family does, too), and obviously some of us have had kids, or we wouldn’t be here to enjoy having animals around!
I personally never had kids, but not because I wanted to have cats instead. There were a lot of reasons and circumstances that caused me to never end up having a family of my own, and never once did I think it had anything to do with having pets.
If you think some people adopt pets because they want to nurture something, you are halfway to answering the question. Ask yourself if those people include people who do not want children. And then of those, ask yourself if their desire is of a maternal/paternal nature.
Question 4.
If you did adopt pets because of a motherly desire to nurture / nourish something, and you did not want to raise a child at the time, you should choose “Agree”.
If you adopted the pets and only later developed a motherly desire to care for them, never before adoption, then you should answer “Disagree”.
Mostly I think you’ve got it backwards. There are many people who have a child as an alternative to owning the cute pet that they really want. Or where that’s the kind of relationship that they crave. And as their children rather quickly become expressive and willful, they feel cheated of the relationship they thought they were going to have and complain of feeling unappreciated.
Hahaha, yes, there are some who treat their kids like pets. My own mother tried to keep me on a leash once because it was all the rage - she abandoned that parenting style when I fell face-first onto the concrete.
(Not that she treated us like pets, just the concept of a child leash seems to come from that school of thought)
I think some people adopt pets because they want to nuture pets. Not because they want to nuture “something.”
And so what am I supposed to do when I adopted pets, and continue to live with them, because of a desire to live with them; not from a supposed “motherly desire” to be or pretend to be the mother of any “something” at all, as if all “somethings” were interchangeable?
Pets are things to be nurtured, are they not? The point is that it can or cannot be nurtured. Pets and children fall into the same category of “something” to be nurtured.
In that case I would answer “Disagree” to question 4.
Right, I’ve briefly read the OP in the pit and the story about the Pope. It’s a complete non-sequitur as far as I can see. No one makes a decision between having children or pets. They don’t have pets to replace children, although having pets no doubt triggers some of the same emotional responses. No doubt some people who can’t have children will have pets and that may help. On the other hand people who choose not to have children aren’t making a choice between children and pets they are simply choosing not to have children.
