It is weird for the traditional view of pets as property, beasts of labour, ornaments, or other living in-person. However recent decades has seen a popular shift towards treating select sentient animals (experience emotions) with some degree of sapience (reasoning/higher cognition), like cats and dogs, as people. Humans treat them as individual persons with their own subjective experience, desires, and lives worth living.
So when a human adopts a non-human animal under this view, they are also taking on the responsibility to care for the animal’s needs and we’ll-being, not just for what the animal provides the human (as would be the case of a beast of burden) but primarily for the sake of the animal’s own worthwhile life–the human takes on a guardianship/parental role. This is why people are more and more being referred to as mom/dad/parent of their pet. More and more people are adopting animals as non-human children. Vets like to enforce it because it reduces animal cruelty and makes people more likely to do basic care.
This isn’t to say many farmers don’t try to give their animals a good life or recognize them as feeling beings with their own personality. They do, but not to the same degree as treating a pet as a non-human child.
Honestly, that doesn’t make it much better. I always viewed the cats my family used to have as family members, but they were anything but children.
The way @[email protected] put it captures it quite nicely. They rely on their owners for certain things, but they are not children and their personalities do not match that.
Referring to them a such gives me the ick because a) it infantilizes beings which, well, simply aren’t children, b) at the same time humanizes them too much. And, paradoxically, c) makes me think of the kind of people who carry dogs around in their handbags and essentially treat them more like plushies rather than actual living beings. Just doesn’t sit right with me.
I think the objection to the term is fine, you don’t have to see yourself as a parent or your pet as your kids. It’s an imperfect analogy for familial closeness and caregiving role–im sure other terms have their advantages. I was more suggesting an explanation for why it makes sense for some people, especially those who adopt puppies. After all, parents to human children stay parents regardless of the children’s age… Which gets to the semantic hiccup behind this disagreement, there are two usages of child, one usage denotes familial relationship and social role, and one denotes age. I’m not a child, but I am the child of my parents.
Words are socially constructed, develop new meanings, and vary between cultures. Pet parent might be a new definition distinct from biological parent. Some people feel comfortable calling every family friend of their parents’ generation auntie/uncle and others find it weird because it defies their blood-relation conception of the term. That’s okay. Live and Let live.
Though, I think comparing the analogy of pets as children to treating pets as plushies says more about how you view children than anything :P
It is weird for the traditional view of pets as property, beasts of labour, ornaments, or other living in-person. However recent decades has seen a popular shift towards treating select sentient animals (experience emotions) with some degree of sapience (reasoning/higher cognition), like cats and dogs, as people. Humans treat them as individual persons with their own subjective experience, desires, and lives worth living.
So when a human adopts a non-human animal under this view, they are also taking on the responsibility to care for the animal’s needs and we’ll-being, not just for what the animal provides the human (as would be the case of a beast of burden) but primarily for the sake of the animal’s own worthwhile life–the human takes on a guardianship/parental role. This is why people are more and more being referred to as mom/dad/parent of their pet. More and more people are adopting animals as non-human children. Vets like to enforce it because it reduces animal cruelty and makes people more likely to do basic care.
This isn’t to say many farmers don’t try to give their animals a good life or recognize them as feeling beings with their own personality. They do, but not to the same degree as treating a pet as a non-human child.
Honestly, that doesn’t make it much better. I always viewed the cats my family used to have as family members, but they were anything but children.
The way @[email protected] put it captures it quite nicely. They rely on their owners for certain things, but they are not children and their personalities do not match that.
Referring to them a such gives me the ick because a) it infantilizes beings which, well, simply aren’t children, b) at the same time humanizes them too much. And, paradoxically, c) makes me think of the kind of people who carry dogs around in their handbags and essentially treat them more like plushies rather than actual living beings. Just doesn’t sit right with me.
I think the objection to the term is fine, you don’t have to see yourself as a parent or your pet as your kids. It’s an imperfect analogy for familial closeness and caregiving role–im sure other terms have their advantages. I was more suggesting an explanation for why it makes sense for some people, especially those who adopt puppies. After all, parents to human children stay parents regardless of the children’s age… Which gets to the semantic hiccup behind this disagreement, there are two usages of child, one usage denotes familial relationship and social role, and one denotes age. I’m not a child, but I am the child of my parents.
Words are socially constructed, develop new meanings, and vary between cultures. Pet parent might be a new definition distinct from biological parent. Some people feel comfortable calling every family friend of their parents’ generation auntie/uncle and others find it weird because it defies their blood-relation conception of the term. That’s okay. Live and Let live.
Though, I think comparing the analogy of pets as children to treating pets as plushies says more about how you view children than anything :P
In that case, we already have words for people who are owned and sold as property. She’s the dog’s master.