You’re not a pet parent, you did not birth or father your dog. If you did by any chance well that is fucking freaky and I’d advise a priest or something.
You don’t have three kids, you have two children and a dog.
Your dog doesn’t have your last name, the “birth certificate” your vet gave you is a non-official piece of crap printed on an ink jet. I don’t care if it lists you and your spouse as the dog’s parents, you aren’t the parents were two dogs.
I understand you love your dog, great dogs are wonderful. But you aren’t it’s mother or father.
I wish pet parent would dissappear from human discourse.
I don’t own Blackjack, he’s my best friend, and I’m his. He calls me Daddy and my wife Mommy, but those are just his names for us. I don’t know what your problem is, what should he call us, Sir and Ma’am? We’re not his parents, but we have to do a lot of things for him. For example, we have to take him to the vet. He says he knows how to drive, but our insurance doesn’t cover dogs so we have take him.
Life is hard for a non-religious crank, other people get to attack stuff like abortions or gay marriage or whatever. I don’t have any of that, but then I found the abuse of the English language and it burned into my soul a mission to stop the perversion of language for nefarious purposes. My newsletter will be MTSTPOLFNP, it isn’t catchy but it will do.
This sounds suspiciously like you don’t really care, you are just trying to get a rise out of people. Let me help.
Maybe for your next trick you could expound on:
circumcision
cat declawing
tipping
dog poop
and a limited audience but one of my personal faves, motorcycles-loud pipes save lives
breast feeding vs formula.
I, for one, am interested in your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I actually don’t have a problem with dog owners calling their dogs “kids”..to other people who think it’s cute. But please understand that there are those of us who don’t find that cute. We find it…odd? Please don’t make me humor you with something that clearly isn’t true.
Eh, one of my cats makes a vocalization that sounds just like Mama. Good enough? She’s very smart, she said it accidentally, I made a big fuss about it, and now she says it when she wants attention. She hasn’t managed to say Daddy yet.
But human speech vocalizations are not the only way of communicating. That same cat tries desperately to mate with human males. Nobody ever has any doubt about what she’s trying to get across. Yes, she’s spayed. Doesn’t matter, she’s just a pervy slutty kitty. Oddly, she doesn’t come on to the male cats. Maybe she can tell that they’ve been neutered. Maybe she just has a thing for human males. She’s at least part Siamese, and Siamese tend to be not quite right in the head.
Another of our cats likes to play fetch, and will tell my husband when he wants to do so. Not in human words, but by bringing a toy to my husband and dropping it in his lap.
Ha ha ha. He cannot speak like a human, he’s a dog, he speaks Dog. But lately, through the use of facilitated communication he can now type, so he can express complex thoughts in English.
Good grief grude! The expanding and over-priced industry of pet ownership relies on ‘parental guilt’ - and you can’t have that without the appropriate labels!
I love my Dalmatian. Weirdly, and probably because of the relationship I have with her, it seems somehow disrespectful for me to refer to her as my ‘dog’ - it just doesn’t express what she means to me. I know that technically she’s my ‘pet’ but in my head, I’ve never called her that. More fitting for fish or seamonkeys or something.
So what’s left? For me, it’s ‘friend’; for 112 years, we’ve been friends. (Ask her.)
I’m not her parent, and I don’t think of myself as such. Although I’m responsible for her I don’t feel that I ‘own’ her; and being her ‘guardian’ feels like she’s a ward of state or something.
So I completely understand why people like to be called ‘the parents’ of their animals they love - it’s nothing more than a preferred nickname. Admittedly, I do correct those who ask if I’m her mum, but in no different a way than if they’d mispronounced my name.
She does have my last name. Hyphenated to her own.