Mine, too.
I’ve never had an overweight cat, and free-feeding is convenient for all of us.
Can’t do that if one of your cats is diabetic. Wet food only and at very specific times to coincide with his insulin shots. I almost yearn for the carefree days of free feeding, up to the time when I start adding up what I pay annually for insulin, needles, testing, vet checks and the time commitment that goes along with specific feeding times. Unfortunately, free feeding dry food is what made him diabetic in the first place, as most commercial dry cat foods are unacceptably high in carbohydrates. Cats, being obligate carnivores, don’t tolerate carbs well.
I used to think that was a cat thing, but I’ve since learned that some cats will overeat in that situation. I’ve been lucky to have cats that were very good at self pacing their food.
I’m not sure if that applies to their stuff or not. It’s relatively expensive, recommended by vets, bla bla, but I haven’t checked the ingredients that closely.
Neat trick–pet foods only have to specify the MINIMUM amounts of protein, carb and fat in the food but don’t actually have to spell out how much of each is actually IN the food. Carbs are cheap so they load them up and a cat evolved to get maybe 3-5% carbs in their diet (mostly from whatever is in the stomachs of their prey at the time they’re eaten) does not do well on food that can be up to 30% carbs (a lot of which is fiber) by weight, and the food scientists at the manufacturers have developed ingredients for palatability that turn cats into kibble junkies. One big change I noted when I transitioned the cats off the dry stuff is they stopped pooping as often or as hugely and the smell factor reduced by orders of magnitude, especially from the diabetic one. That cat used to be able to clear a room in seconds with his godsawful crap but now it’s pretty inoffensive. Which is good because he never, EVER covers up his dumps. Savage creature.
Huh. When i divide out the water, and subtract the protein, fat, and fiber from both the wet and dry foods, there’s more room in the wet food for carbs than there is in the dry food. They’re actually pretty similar in gross nutrition (as listed) except for the moisture content, which is 78% of the wet food and 10% of the dry.
I buy expensive dry cat food, though.
I found a few people who went to the trouble of figuring out which wet foods are indeed low carb (below 10% by weight) and my takeaway was that Friskies pate style foods are the best junction of price/quality. Yearly lab tests on Mr Diabeetus indicate this is indeed a sound analysis, as his blood sugar has remained stable with an unchanging insulin dosage for going on four years now. That’s actually a pretty decent track record for a diabetic cat, all things considered.
On a Nova show about dogs, they said that dogs tell time by the way the day smells at that time. The grass, dirt, air, etc. will release different odors at different times of the day. By identifying the way the air smells at their mealtime, your dog learns that’s the time they get to eat. We can sort of do the same thing with certain odors. We can tell if some odors are fresh or have faded. For example, if you walk into a kitchen where bacon was recently cooked, by the smell alone you can tell if it was cooked a few minutes ago or if it was cooked hours ago. And if someone cooks bacon while you’re sleeping, you may actually wake up from the smell alone because your brain knows that smell means fresh bacon is in the kitchen. Your dog is doing the same thing. Even asleep, they recognize what the air smells like at their dinner time and wake up to go eat.
Interesting. He does have a great nose.
I have herding dogs, pretty sure they can tell time. Maybe if I changed to analog clocks… 
Yeah, I once had a self-paced eater for 17 years - she stayed as fit as could be. Years after she passed when I got two more as kittens, I just reverted to free-feeding again assuming that would work. Soon as they hit ~7-8 months and their kitten metabolisms started to slow a bit, they promptly started ballooning up and I had to put them on a diet.
Then one turned out to have urinary crystal issues and it was all wet food from there on out, which effectively killed any lingering thought of returning to a modified free-feed. But it was so, so easy once upon a time with that earlier pet.
Amen!
I know a lot of people who were dating or married and had dog(s) and/or cat(s). We had friends who called their dog and cat “our practice children”.
They just meant it as “Look, if we can’t handle being responsible for an animal, maybe we’d better wait to have kids.”
(They passed their own test, and have now had a child).
NOTE: They were mentally healthy, and NOT like my other friend who dotes on her “fur babies” as she carries them in a stroller (and may well try to send them to nursery school).
.
We had kids first, then “aminals” (as they called 'em).
I’m still a little puzzled by the use of “acceptable” in the thread title. I keep imagining someone from the government showing up at my door asking to inspect my children. When I mention that I don’t have any, preferring dogs, he shakes his head, marks his clipboard, and declares my situation “unacceptable”.
Well, results are in!
Now for interpretation. I made it no secret that my principle interest was between questions 3 and 4 - it seems to me that a person who disagrees with Q.3 necessarily predicts that nobody would agree with Q.4.
It looks like 22 people disagreed with Q.3, yet 24 people agreed with Q.4. My take away from this straw poll is that the following statement holds true,
Some people, who do not want children (or if applicable more children) for various reasons, choose to adopt pets to fulfill a motherly/fatherly desire or duty to love or nourish.
~Max
I agree with you, cats/dogs are not equivalent to children. The title question, by the use of the word “alternative”, does not imply pets are equivalent (emotionally or otherwise) to children. Just like, when driving, an alternative route isn’t necessarily equivalent with respect to travel time. What matters is if the alternative is sufficient or acceptable to the person involved.
~Max
There’s that weird “desire or duty” again.
Some people eat vegetables because they enjoy them or think they are good for them.
Some people shovel snow because they want exercise or because their municipality requires them to.
None of these sentences really makes sense, except to explain that some people have pets, eat vegetables, or shovel snow. None of them gives any insight into why people do these things.
If you are thinking that people have a duty to have kids, and might turn to a pet to fulfill that duty, then it makes sense. If you think people have pets because they want pets, then it looks like it’s from out in left field.
You’re still presuming that the alternate routes are all going to the same place.
And you’re presuming that every person wants to go to that location in the first place.
Neither of those things is true.
(One of) the problem(s) with Question 4 is that it allows for people who can’t have children while the focus of the discussion, and the thrust of the Pope’s comments, was centred on people who don’t want children. They are very different situations and don’t deserve to be lumped together into one question.
Edit: Your conclusion statement only considers people who don’t want children, yet for all you know, all of the people who answered yes to 4 may have been unable to have children.
I think it is a certainty that somewhere, sometime, some place, there are or were people who fulfill your apparent need to have pets be a solution to childlessness. It’s just not the norm for pet owners who don’t have children.
That you refuse for some reason to accept this undoubted fact, based on virtually every opinion stated in this thread, is peculiar but probably harmless.
And that’s where it gets weird, IMO. I know quite a few couples without children whose pets are known to me socially because they talk about them a lot, even though I’ve never physically met them. Stuff like “Oh, we’ve got to go; we’re taking Jack to the dog park in the morning early and need to get some sleep.” And I know that Jack is their dog because he’s a major enough part of their lives that they talk about him to their friends.
I mean, nothing wrong with having pets, but I wouldn’t expect to know the names of people’s pets, unless I’ve actually been to their house and met them. Pets typically aren’t interesting enough to warrant much third-party communication (a dog IS a dog, and does typical dog stuff, after all), unless their owners are acting weird about them.