We visit a handful of breweries in our area. Three are pet friendly and we specifically patronize them because of this. In fact Leaning Cask is so pet friendly that all of their beers have dog related names.
That’s exactly right. I wasn’t sure how to phrase it.
Naw, my cats give me emotional support in a way minor children don’t. Yes, cats don’t pull their weight physically, but they do emotionally. The cats can tell when I need them, too.
I have never had a dog, but I think the same is true of them.
Yeah, this is something I see waaaaaaay more often than some kind of amorphous need to nurture.
It is. Nothing like unsolicited dog snuggles when you really need it.
The caretaking required for a cat is to dump a cup of cat food a day into their bowl and top up their water if they don’t have a natural source. A vet visit once a year for worming and shots and that’s it. It is so far removed from looking after a child it’s not comparable. It’s literally a minute a day. Add another minute a day for scooping the litter tray if they don’t go outside.
But there’s nothing about having a cat that precludes having children. If a cat fulfils the need to nurture then it’s not a very strong need.
It’s interesting to me that all the hypothetical conversations people posted afterwards are in the context of couples. These two are very much single.
Well, it is difficult to have children if you’re single.
Feel free to imagine the conversations as an internal monologue if you like.
You don’t scoop your cat’s litter box, or take them to the vet if they’re sick? You don’t play with them or provide them any stimulation? You don’t trim their dew claws before they grow into the pads of their feet, or at least check to make sure they haven’t?
I concede that even the most high-maintenance cat is far less work than a child, but what you’re describing sounds like neglect.
We had cats for about 20 years total. They lived to be 13 and 15.
One of them once had a psychotic episode where he but the other one in the neck and nearly killed her. That required many, many vet visits and much home care.
Apart from that annual visits to the vet were all that were required until they each got a serious and ultimately fatal illness. They required months of treatment, including daily injections for one of them near the end.
But for 90% of each of their lives we fed them, cleaned the litter box and cuddled with them when they deemed us worthy and played with them with cat toys (but only until they were about two years old)
On average maybe not one minute per day, but definitely under 15, probably under 5.
And how many minutes per day would you expect to spend caring for a roommate?
On their recent annual vet visit the vet described them as very well looked after. One of them is 17 and the other 15 so they don’t pay much attention if you try to play with them. But even when they were younger, playing with them is much more about amusing the human than the cat. The cat is perfectly happy out in the garden chasing butterflies. They don’t come over and ask to be played with, they are totally fine with doing their own thing. Unlike children.
Yes we take them to the vet if we think they might be sick. That’s very rare though, every few years maybe? And I did mention scooping litter, however my previous cats didn’t use a litter tray, they went in the garden. Claws get done once a year at the vet. When the cats were younger and more active the claws took care of themselves.
One major difference is that a cat spends most of its life in your care as an adult. Yes they retain some kitten traits but they are fully capable of looking after themselves and have no actual need of anything from their owner other than sustenance. If they haven’t been taken too early they’ve learned about being a cat from their mother in their first couple of months as a kitten. Using dirt to cover their droppings is instinctive and guiding them to use a tray or to go outside is very easy. The nurturing is over and done with in half a year if that.
On the other hand you have children while they are children, the equivalent of a kitten, but the time is extended over many years and the workload is so much more I can’t even begin to think of a reasonable multiplier.
Cats are more like room mates in that they exist and do their own thing without needing something from you every waking moment.
Never had a roommate. But I assume none. Unless I was caring for the roommate for some reason (e.g. they are disabled and I provide some level of care in exchange for lower rent or some other payment). But then that’s not really a roommate arrangement.
Sorry, I accidentally hit reply early.
Obviously you don’t, or shouldn’t, look after a flatmate at all. Flatmates also don’t sit on my lap while I play computer games late at night. And a cat doesn’t pay rent or clean after itself. It wasn’t meant to be a one to one comparison. A better comparison would be that a cat is like a late teenager who still lives at home because it’s convenient. (Which felt to me, when I was one of those, much like being a flatmate).
Pets can provide many of the same feelings of being loved, giving love, and providing care. However, the big difference is that pets don’t require as much mandatory attention. If the owner doesn’t feel like providing attention, they just tell the pet to leave them alone. Pets generally are fine with that–it’s not animal abuse or anything–but it gives the owner a lot of freedom and a lot less responsibility compared to children. A parent can feel like they have little freedom over their personal time because of the demands of being a parent, but the same is not at all true with a pet.
I’ve had a number of roommates, and I’d say that I’ve spent far longer than 5-15 minutes a day cleaning up after them, fixing things that they have broken, or waiting on access to the bathroom/shower.
I spend much less time cuddling them as well.
Mine say they NEED to be patted. And, often, to sleep next to me (and/or each other.)
However, yes, for most of their lives they are adults. That’s one of the differences in the relationship, though not the only one.
I have lived with late teenagers, though they weren’t my children (most of them, not counting when I was a teenager myself, were farm interns.) It’s nothing like living with cats; except perhaps that to a large extent both will do as they damn well please.
I’ve found it much easier not to tick off the cats.
No. is that a common problem? I’ve had several cats. One cat has one claw that sometimes grows into her pad. We think a child accidentally stepped on her foot and broke that toe when she was a kitten, and it healed wrong. So yes, we keep an eye on that one claw. But otherwise, we provide our cats with attractive scratching posts, and they keep their claws groomed.
I’m going to agree with “minimum level of care to keep your cat healthy is typically very minor”. Yeah, sometimes a cat has a medical problem and the required care spikes. But normally? Really really minor.
The minimal caretaking required for a human toddler is about the same. That will also get you done by CPS right sharpish.
IME, it’s never a cat.
Yes. We love our cats but they are not our kids, and they are not people.
I have heard of couples who can’t have kids having pets instead.
I have never heard of a couple deciding NOT to have kids and instead having pets. It doesn’t work that way, so the women tell me.
Well, the minimal caretaking for a cat is actually nothing at all. Let them out in the wild and they will be fine. A child is demanding of time and attention as well as general care and feeding etc. Cats demand none of this. They may be given it, but they ask for nothing other than food and a warm place to sleep. I could go away for a couple of days and the cats probably wouldn’t notice. Not so with the children.
Of course, you’re not a crazy cat lady if there’s just one cat.
I think you have it backwards. It’s not that your crazy cat friends don’t have children because they don’t have cats, it’s far more likely that they have cats because they don’t have children. The decision (or circumstances) that lead to no children had nothing to do with having or wanting cats, but having cats does fulfil a basic need to “mother” something.
Anything is possible though, maybe they really did decide to have cats instead of children.
There’s definitely, definitely, definitely no logic to human behavior.
Most of them will die within the first year or two. Enough will likely live to keep the species going; but, for cats, that’s not my definition of “fine”.
You don’t know any cat I’ve ever lived with. Which over 70 years has been a lot of them.
Children demand an amount of time and attention beyond what cats do, and in addition demand different types of time and attention. (Nobody ever has to have The Talk with a cat, whether it’s about sex or how to behave around the police. Nobody ever has to try to figure out a cat’s homework, or convince their teacher to call on them in class. I could go on for quite a while; parents I’m sure could go on longer.) But cats most certainly demand time and attention; though many of them will demand it only from humans they know well and trust. If they’re feral or semi-feral, they’re getting it from each other. Yours may be semi-feral; or they may just have learned that it’s no good asking you for anything other than food.
That part you’ve got right.
It probably does do that for some people. But again, the cats are mostly adults, and not everyone is “mothering” the cats who they live with.
And – this one is important – not everyone has “a basic need to mother something.”
I think that’s part of what’s going on here, including with the Pope. While I’ve never met anyone who decided not to have children because they had or wanted to have cats/dogs/etc., I most certainly have met people who don’t believe that any humans exist who genuinely don’t want to have children. They just plain can’t wrap their heads around the idea; they themselves want children so badly, as such an essential part of their being, that the concept that there are normal human beings who do not want to have or raise children is beyond them. Therefore, they think that everyone who doesn’t have kids must have some sort of gaping hole inside themselves that they must feel a need to fill with something.
And there are also probably people who’ve never tried to wrap their heads around the idea, because they’ve been told all their lives by those in the first group that Everybody Wants Kids; and so they assume that it’s true, often to the point of somewhat automatically having children themselves while simply assuming that they want to, or will want to once they hold the kid (a trick which only sometimes works). When faced by somebody saying No I Don’t, they assume that person is lying to themselves, and/or will change their minds later.
Now there apparently are people who do have a gaping hole inside themselves if they don’t have kids. I come to that conclusion because there are people who go to huge lengths to produce children, including large amounts of time and money spent on medical interventions even when those seem unlikely to work; and partly also because there are people who say they badly want/wanted children, and I’m inclined to mostly believe people about the insides of their own heads unless there’s clear reason to think otherwise.
But there are also people who really, really don’t want children. They can’t stand the presence of small children, and/or they can’t deal with the continuous demands required.
And there are, of course, people in the middle: who under other circumstances might have wanted children and if they’d had them would have loved and cared for them as individuals; not as members of a category that fulfills some “basic need to mother something”; which may not be a need that they have at all, or may be one that they have only weakly, so that it doesn’t mess them up if they don’t do anything about it. (People who do have that need may also love their children as individuals, of course. I think most of them do. Hard on the kids when they don’t – just as it’s hard on the kids when people who really don’t want kids have them anyway.)
Yep.
Exactly. I have a cat who has mastered the 'kitten mew" and “sad eyes” to get what he wants. They know when the alarm goes off and jump off the bed and expect a treat…even if it is Saturday when the alarm doesn’t go off.
And of course, if the cat is suffering or the vet estimate is astronomical, one can have a pet put down, not so with children. It is sad, yes, but not like when a human dies.