I am trying to find my voice on a parenting blog.  But let me do a small rant on one thing that bothers me.  Dogs.  Specifically, dogs who are replacements for kids.  If you don’t want to have kids, well that is all well and good.  Don’t have kids, live your life.  But don’t try and claim that your “dogs” are some kind of child for you.  They are not surrogate children.  They are dogs.  They are like really tall hamsters.  Your kid gets run over by a car, people are going to jail.  Your dog gets run over, well, that sucks.

I have friends that are thinking about having kids but in the meantime they talk about their “kids”, their dogs.  They post pictures of themselves with their dogs with captions like “Hanging with the kids”.  Their mother posts things like “Loving my granddogs”.  Did your dog have puppies and then they had puppies?  They might be your “Granddogs” otherwise, no.  Get off it.

Otherwise it just seems like you like the idea of kids, the “mystique” of children, but you really don’t want to deal with the hassle, the expense, the commitment.  Instead, you anthropomorphize your dogs and try and claim parent status without having to really put in the work or commitment.  Do you get up in the middle of the night to nurse your dog or comfort it because of night terrors or bad dreams (this is rhetorical, if you answered “yes”, please seek professional help).

So, no, your dogs are not your kids.  My kid’s crawdad is not his kid.  Nor are the cats our kids.  Our dog is not related to us in any way.  We own the dog.   Various meal-worms that we raise to feed to lizards, they are not our kids.  Baby goats may in fact be our kids, but I muddy the issue.

I see cutesy but belligerent shirts and posters about “Yes, my dogs are my kids.   I am going to talk about them as much as you do your kids.”  BS.  How do your dogs do in school?  What, they can’t talk or read?  What part of the autistic spectrum are they on?  You keep them on a leash?  CALL CPS!  They aren’t kids, you need to rethink your life.  You get over it.

 

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2014 at 2:44 am by Pappy Van Winkle and is filed under Bring the Fun, lol, Parental Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.