A friend of mine was saying something about how his pets are like kids to him. That’s something that only people who never have had kids say, and it kind of pisses me off. Because I love and cherish my pets, and I wouldn’t want to live without them, but to me a child is a child and a pet is a pet, and there is a deep divide between them. After all, if you’ve got a dog who is getting blind and crippled and in pain, you can put it down. Most cultures frown on you doing that to Grandma. If your dog is untrainable, pees on the floor and bites you, you can give it away. Can’t do that with your kids, even though some people joke about wanting to do it.
But thinking along that way, I started thinking about how else to think about the difference between pets and kids. I’m not claiming any deep insight here, just some semi-random thoughts. And what I thought was this: If somebody said “I need you to kill your pet in order to save your kid’s life”, I don’t think there is a parent out there who would hesitate for a second. And if it were the other way around, I seriously doubt that any parent would kill their kid for the sake of their dog, cat, parrot or monkey. And I don’t care if it’s the best pet in the world (next to my former dog Heidi, of course, who is the standard by which all other pets are judged and found wanting), and the meanest, nastiest worst kid in the world. There just isn’t any question in my mind, a kid is more important than a pet.
But then I started thinking further along that line. Sure, a person is more important than a pet. But would you, say, kill a pet to save the life of your friend? I think there would be a bit more hesitation, and a number of people would say “no”. Ok then, how about to save the life of a complete stranger in your neighbourhood? Or a complete stranger in another country? As the emotional distance of the person being saved goes up, I think the number of people willing to make the sacrifice goes down. It’s as if there is a “calculus of life”, where the worth of a person or animal’s life is weighted by their emotional closeness to you. I guess we see that in the way the public gets all concerned about a single missing cute blonde American girl, but doesn’t give a shit about thousands dead in a some far off land, especially if they are a different race. It’s not that they are less human, it’s that they are emotionally more distant. We can’t bleed for everybody, so we look for similarity and closeness.
And what if it’s something even more abstract? I’m sure some could make the argument “if you gave up on pet ownership and gave that money to Mediciens sans Frontiers, you’d save dozens of human lives.” And objectively they’re probably right. But you know what? I’m not going to. And I guess in that bizarre calculus, my life is more enriched by looking down at my snoozing dog than it would be knowing that those abstract and unknown people are alive. And in a way, I find that fact sad, but I see the inevitability of it too.
I think the relationships I have with my pets (and we shall particularly consider Tink, because she is my favorite) is qualitatively different from the relationship I would have if I had a child, and that is why I have dogs and cats and not children. I also think that English and western civ don’t give us a good way to discuss the relationships we have with our pets without making comparisons to children.
The easiest shorthand for my relationship with The Usual Suspects is, indeed, “they’re like kids.” But they’re not like kids, or I’d have kids and not 2 dogs and three cats.
To be sure, The Usual Suspects are small lives in my care, who require me to provide the necessities for life and to protect them, as best I can, from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This is similar, at a very basic level, to the relationship an adult has with a child. But I also depend upon the dogs to warn me of intruders, to be willing to protect me as I am willing to protect them, and Tink in particular to be…a sort of emotional outrigger to help me stabilize myself. These are things that are unlike the relationship I would have with a child. And all of this paragraph is, of course, a drastic simplification of the relationship I have with The Usual Suspects, and Tink in particular.
So while I might occasionally /say/ “they’re like kids” it’s because I’m shorthanding as best I can a very complex relationship, probably to avoid subjecting someone to a 90 minute dissertation on Why I Love My Tink. I know they’re not like kids, but there’s probably not a good way to explain what they /are/ like.
At times, I still find myself reeling from Cody’s death. But I know that there is a fundamental difference between my dogs — no matter how I love them — and my kids. When I have dreams about something happening to my kids, I wake in a panic and have to (HAVE TO) immediately check on them. Would I trade my dog for my kids? Without hesitation, without thinking. I think of it this way — if my house were on fire, who would I get out first? My kids. Leave the dogs, leave the husband. And I’ve commented on that to AJ, and that he should do the same: Save the kids, leave me to burn. Because I wouldn’t want to live otherwise.
As you may know from lists far far away, I have to NOT read/watch news stories about terrible things happening to children. News stories about things happening to children “like” mine — age especially — are the worst. That can be the trigger for a panic attack.
And yes, the more “different” the child is, the more likely it is I can keep it abstract and detached. Further, the “bigger” the tragedy (war, famine, tsunami), the more abstract it is.
Paul, I think Andrea has explained this better than I have, both in my post that pissed yu off and my follow-up comment to your comment…