The child-like role of dogs in Western societies(econtent.hogrefe.com) |
The child-like role of dogs in Western societies(econtent.hogrefe.com) |
I believe there are a few things leading many people to choose pets instead of children to fulfill their desire to nurture:
1. The trauma theory of psychology.
Pop psychology today seems to assume that babies are born perfectly mentally healthy, except for any genetic mental illnesses they inherited from their parents. Then at some point, if they're unlucky, they experience some sort of trauma, often at the hands of their parents. That trauma inflicts a mental illness on them. They can treat it with therapy and/or meds, but the assumption is that the illness is irrevocable. (Don't believe me? The next time you're talking to a friend and they bring up therapy or mental health medication, ask them when they think they'll be cured and can stop.)
The implication here is that as a parent, you've got basically nowhere to go but down with regards to your kid's mental health. If you are yourself perfectly mentally healthy and pass on no predispositions to your kid, and you parent them flawlessly 24/7 for eighteen years and dodge every possible trauma, then congrats you didn't fuck them up. Anything less than that and you're a bad parent. Which leads to...
2. Impossible parenting standards.
Media is constantly filled with all of the various ways a parent can do a bad job. Start the car moving down the driveway before they have their seatbelt on? Bad parent. Let them walk to the park on their own and risk being abducted? Bad parent. Give them access to junk food? Bad parent. Don't put them in enough extracurricular activities to pad their college application letter a decade from now? Bad parent. Too many extracurricular activities so they don't have enough free time in which to learn initiative? Bad parent.
It is unending and demoralizing the ways in which parents are made to constantly feel they are inadequate. When I was a kid, if another kid fell playing and broke their arm, it was just "OK, kids get hurt." Today, it's "Why did you let them do that?" Parents have never spent more time with their children than they do today, but our culture still tells us it's not enough. Or, if it does, they tell us it's too much.
Mix that with the previous point, and having a kid with any mental health challenges is not just a tragedy but your fault as a parent.
3. Long-term pessimism.
I know many people who truly do believe the world is fucked because of climate change and politics. Not only do they not believe any potential children of theirs would be raised in a world worse than they one they grew up in, they don't even have faith that world will be functionally habitable at all.
Best case, they believe their children may thrive only because they happen to be born into privilege while other children in poorer locations will suffer catastrophically from climate change. So the best outcome they can imagine is a profound failing of moral justice.
Meanwhile, consider pets:
1. Rescued from trauma.
Most pet owners get their pets from shelters. The animal may actually have had trauma before being adopted, but the owner wasn't morally responsible. Instead, they are the rescuer that saved the animal from further trauma. If the animal bounces back and has great behavior, then it's a testament to the amazing resilence of animals and the benefits of compassionate ownership. If the animal always has behavioral issues, well it's not their fault they were traumatized and what a good owner they have to take care of them in spite of those challenges.
2. High but meetable standards
Standards for pet ownership are certainly high here too. Long gone are the days of putting the dog in a doghouse in the backyard and giving them a scoop out of the giant cheap bag of Alpo every day. Pets are expected to be fed healthy food, kept inside and safe, given good vet care, and lots of interaction and enrichment.
Those standards are high but attainable. You can just do those things and feel like a good pet owner. And the pet will certainly make you feel like a good pet owner. Their expectations are low and it's easy to exceed them.
3. Shorter life span
If you believe the world is doomed, then a living being that will never outlive you and have to figure out how to make its without your support is a blessing. You don't have to feel guilty about the fact that in a thousand tiny ways, you contributed to climate change that will end up harming a loved one decades from now.
I love dogs, I had dogs as a kid, I have a dog now. I don't, nor have I ever thought my dog is a replacement for children. My dog doesn't hold me back from forming human relationships. Yet there is this weird online value judgement (never actually seen it IRL) that owning a dog is somehow a betrayal of the human race.
we have a good relationship with the children we raised, along with their children. Our dog, however, is always with us and it just feels good to watch after her. We don't consider her a child, just a very good, non-verbal friend.
There is certainly an imbalance between dog and human authority/autonomy/agency, but that is not the only dynamic in the relationship. And it’s not necessarily the defining dynamic, nor is it consistently applicable.
Whether she understands how we feel about her isn't the point or the definition. She seems happy and doesn't live in any kind of fear, and that makes all the difference to us. Anything else is just picking fly scat out of pepper.
As a lifelong rescuer of pit bulls and other "problem" dogs, I can see how that role I've picked for myself aligns and contrasts with how others view human-dog relationships.
Back in "the day" these people would get into crappy marriages and pop out a few kids before ultimately getting divorced or just be single moms. While it's nice that they're not doing that I think the more interesting angle is the picture of how the economic reality has changed over the generations.
As in many things, most people are willing to ignore any aspect that is not what's in their face, and appealing to them.
There are many other aspects to the thoughtless use of other animals to assuage a human's mental illness.
One of the main ones is projection: the animal can't speak, or otherwise precisely express themselves. Into this silence, the human is able to inject whatever narrative they desire. This leads to people claiming that the animal is much more responsive to their needs, and provides greater solace than another human. This solace is purely in the mind of the beholder. No one knows what the dog is thinking, therefore it's thinking exactly what we want it to think.
Another aspect of the entire pet issue, that I haven't seen otherwise mentioned in the comments, is the disruption to the public peace caused by many dogs. I have seen a couple of comments about dog shit, which is a major problem, but noise is also a significant issue.
Both of these are primarily the fault of negligent owners, which are the overwhelming majority of modern US pet owners.
Declining birth rates are clearly a response to the deterioating economic conditions of most people. Stagnant real wages, skyrocketing costs, ever-more inaccessible housing and so on. Housing debt, student debt, medical debt. The cost of childcare can reach $3000/month per child. If you want your child to have the best opportunities, it may well cost $1 million or more between all those costs to raise a child. At a time when people can barely provide for themselves.
Of course pets are surrogate children for some people. And even that's being ruined by capitalism as private equity moves into the vet space to squeeze every last dollar from people.
Another aspect to this is social control. One reason Western societies have been relatively stable is the method of control is treats, basically. Social media, pets, smartphones, etc all mollify the masses. In more totalitarian societies, the threat of violence is a more typical method of control. Think of something like the Stasi in East Germany.
The profit motive is destroying the treats. If you're on the verge of homelessness and can barely feed yourself, skyrocketing costs of pet ownership are a real issue. We're rapidly approaching a point where people think they'll never be able to retire and really have nothing to live for.
Rather than the ultra-wealthy being slightly less wealthy so the rest of society, which is necessary for their wealth to exist, can have something good in their lives, we're instead becoming increasingly oppressive. Over-policing, militarizing police, crushing protests (as per this last weekend in LA), etc.
Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. And to think, all a lot of people need to be happy is a roof over their head, not having to have 3 jobs and being able to have a dog.
You know what we all need? Another article about LLMs.
It is no surprise that people are fans of them, for a variety of reasons.
I’m very disappointed to see such wide adoption of pets, especially dogs, as “replacements” of children in adult lives. I do not think it’s healthy for adults to do this because it infantilizes the adult. It is actually very sad, almost pitiful to see it happen. I think pets are wonderful for children because it helps them to develop a connection with living beings that aren’t humans, to see emotions are a universal trait.
More frequently I see now grown people wheeling their dogs in baby carriages. If this is some cosmic-scale humor by nature because we have overpopulated the planet and it’s intentionally sabotaging the environment, then I’m afraid the joke is on us.
I thought that was ridiculous because these are just animals. It sucks when they die but it’s not the end of the world.
Another car nearby killed a little child and her father and that one was much more horrific to me.
But now it makes sense: to these people the two incidents were equivalent. I suppose that is normal, what with all the stories of animals caring for the young of other animals. Neotenic characteristics seem to have cross-species impact.
Very cool. Thank you for sharing this.
I once watched a woman hold her little dog over the glass at the pizza bar in Whole Foods. Was waiting for the dog to drop a free sausage link onto the pizza below.
Placing dogs into shopping carts is another one. Dogs rub their dirty buttholes on the same surfaces where you later place your fruits and vegetables.
I'm broke. As much as it pains me to be without a pet, I dont want to take on additional responsibilities if I am incapable of sufficiently giving the care these living beings need and deserve.
I've considered fostering, as they pay for many things the animals need. Perhaps in the future.
They drain resources and get free care while offering no benefit other than satisfying maternal urges which were designed to work on human babies. Puppies are 100 percent part of the reason for the westernized world’s population problem.
Delete all social media, and, if you can, choose to have absolutely no dealings with the big tech industry
I've noticed this too. I try not to use Reddit very much, if at all, but when I do this sentiment is one that sticks out now. It's not everywhere, but you can certainly find an undercurrent of anti-dog, "downfall of western civilization," "Children of Men was so prescient" sentiment in the comments of some posts featuring dogs that make it to r/all.
There were many factors that went into my wife and I deciding not to have kids, but dogs being a replacement for children was not one of them. We made that decision years before we got our first dog.
I did a lengthy paid survey a few years back that was sponsored by a VC owned pet supply company in my country. All the questions were to non pet owners, or former reluctant non owners and was aimed at getting data on how much pet ownership improved your life. I have seen the results of this survey paraphased and published in every single major news outlet in my country ('science says pet good!'). Pets are consumption, companies run PR campaigns to promote consumption of their product.
I think the politicisation has come because you can't now criticise the pet or having of pets without it being seen as an attack on the owners whole lifestyle and personal image, for those who have become dog dads/dog mums. But for people who do take a position against it, they have to be willing to make that attack on someone's image to get their point across.
I dont want pets, I think a not insignificant # of people have them for the wrong reasons (like the above comment on trauma rescuing), I think over consumption of pet at a macro level is bad, but I like all the individual dogs and cats I know in my life.
Urban / rural people like to keep dogs. Poor / rich people like keeping dogs. Liberal / conservative people like keeping dogs. Young / old people like keeping dogs.
Huh, never seen or heard of this. I'd put it down to "weird online thing", yeah.
Puppies wean from around 3-8 weeks and aren't adopted until 8-10 weeks, well after they are weaned. This is obviously true because when people adopt puppies, they aren't feeding them milk replacement out of a bottle. The puppy is eating solid food.
My wife fosters kittens, and she frequently gets a litter along with the mother cat. In most cases, the mom cat completely loses interest in the kittens well before they are ready to be adopted out. Often, the mom cat leaves and goes up for adoption before the kittens do because she is no longer taking care of them at all.
The problem isn't so much having to deal with the dogs that have already been manufactuered, they should be supported as well as possible, the problem is stopping the ongoing manufacture of new animals as products.
If you continue this idea, then the dogs we consider "normal" all suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. The dogs we consider aggressive show the behavior that is actually logical and relatable.
This is why I truly believe AI companions are going to be the downfall of civilization. Now you don't even need to project what you want them to think. The AI will just actually say what you want it to.
While there are some surface level similarities to owning a pet and having children, it’s absurd to conflate the two as if they are equivalent.
On r/poveryfinance and similar subreddits, one can always find someone complaining that they're about to become homeless because they can't afford rent, begging others to please tell them what line item can be cut from their budget to make it work, the conceit being that they consider every item essential. Mixed in among the electrical and water and costs of commuting to work will be $100/month for dog food or cat litter or whatever.
Not only is there no value there, there is, quite often, anti-value. And this is just the quantifiable stuff, these people follow their dogs around picking up their feces with their hands.
Where did you get this premise from?
I think the only entity sabotaging the environment is we humans. Nature deals with what it's given by adapting. I do think the baby carriages are hilarious, unless it's a geriatric pet.
Plus nobody enforces a lot of health and safety laws anymore, it's not uncommon to see dogs in grocery stores for example, despite it being illegal and gross.
If that connection with their dogs is what brings them personal fulfillment, why is that not meaningful? And can they not personally develop within that chosen life path?
What are people not building too that you think they should? What have you built that's so great?
What exactly are people not achieving when they have a dog?
I bought my first home in my twenties, have a very high paying job, I have good friends, I play music sometimes, I grow my own food, I can cook better than most restaurants, I am happy most of the time, I am reasonably physically fit and can climb a mountain (literally).
What meaningful progress is my dog holding me back from?
The issue is.. pets are still pets. And to your point, unbehaved dog can be dangerous to its immediate surrounding. I won't go into details, but our dog is very protective of our kid, so there are places I will not take it ( or at least not without precautions ).. and this is what I see less and less: responsible behavior.
But I will say this, dog was a great training for a kid, when it came for us, because we saw some very similar issues repeat themselves.
The issue is what it has always been: people.
What I’m really poking at here in the joke behind the rant sort of way is a suspicion, a conspiracy by nature to suppress our reproduction capabilities by slowly not only making us infertile in greater numbers, but steering us towards adopting pets instead of humans as a prank, to make us see the animals we are in an animal kingdom.
Your dog can be cute and child-like and playful for its entire life, but is also far more self-sufficient than a human child is in the first year or two of its life.
It’s kind of like you get to be a make-believe parent without any of the difficult parts.
I would not blame nature for this. I'm not particularly conspiracy-minded (humans are generally too stupid for supervillain-style conspiracies), but people did this. The only question at all is whether they did it deliberately, or if it was accidental.
>then I’m afraid the joke is on us.
It's definitely on us.
You see this in cinema. We're relieved that the cat survives in Alien, even though we just watched several humans die horribly. And we kind of feel like John Wick's Roaring Rampage of Revenge is justified after the Russian mafia kills his dog.
This never gets reconciled with the reality of factory farms and mass meat production. It’s certainly a type of cognitive dissonance. In a hundred years we might look back on the now with horror (more generalized anyway).
You can feel that way, and that's fine, but people are allowed to decide what they do or don't find precious. They are allowed to rank species and members within a species in order of most to least precious. There's no inherent rule that all life must be valued the same. Would you not be more sad about a human child dying over a cow? Would you not be more sad about a loved one dying about a random person you don't know a few thousand miles away?
They reproduce faster then us so puppies are able to get cuter then babies over generations and thus they are out competing us.
If you had to choose between a family member dying or a totally random person dying, even though objectively they're both just humans, you're going to kill the random person, because you have feelings and emotions, and they are part of the equation. For the same reason you'd kill the random person, people would kill the cow, and want to save the dog.
But make no mistake, they're still animals and are not predictable. I would never bring a dog with me outside to do anything other than go for a walk, always on a leash. They really dont belong in public spaces. I've seen and heard too many stories of dogs suddenly not being the perfect precious animal their owner claims and it bites or attacks another animal or person. Then when they do the owners insist the victim must have done something wrong and take zero responsibility.
No, they treat them as better than people.
Because in their value system, animals are moral objects but not moral subjects. By that, I mean that actions done to animals can have moral weight. If you take a sick kitten and nurse it back to health, you are a good person. If you kick a puppy, you are a bad person.
But the animal itself (according to this culture) carries no moral responsibility. If a dog bites someone, it's not an evil dog. It's not the dog's fault. It was just raised poorly, or traumatized as a puppy, or the owner should have kept it leashed better, etc.
Thus animals are always morally pure, but people can be bad people. I kind of get where the value system is coming from: animals really are on the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to power and agency, so it does make sense to think of them as mostly receivers of moral actions. But some people take that really far.
This seems a bit extreme. I think dog owners have a responsibility to make sure their animal is trained and able to be controlled near people, but outdoor public spaces (parks/plazas, cafes with outdoor seating whose management is dog friendly), seem fine.
However, the responsibility for your dog's behavior extends even outside of public space. I was bitten by a dog in the lobby of a friend's building. The dog was leashed and presumably just returning from a walk. Later, I heard that some inspections in that building had to be rescheduled because a dog bit one of the inspectors while inside one of the condos (not sure if it was the same dog). Being in a non-public space in no way reduces the owner's responsibility.
I’m in tears.
I know dozens of couples who were pairs of high earners but one quit their job to stay at home with their child because it was cheaper than paying for child care, but sure, tell yourself it's the dogs.
The economy IS a factor.
But sinking resources into a dog that offers no evolutionary or biological benefit IS ALSO a factor.
There is no other way to look at this. You are committing an act of irrationality if you refuse to see dogs from a biological perspective.
Porn sits in the same area. Hijacking biological instincts to prevent reproduction.
We are looking at multiple causal sources that prevent us from having more children. In the same way men use porn to assuage our sexual urges, many women use dogs to help assuage their maternal instincts. Don’t let your emotions cloud your logic.
This article did not deserve to get flagged simply for offering their own perspective.
If a dog keeps depression at bay, someone could possibly avoid having their brain chemistry permanently altered by owning a dog.
There are even working breeds with many different purposes. It's not all black lab and American Eskimo.
Isn't "100 percent" redundant here? In general X is either part of the reason for Y or X is not part of the reason for Y. I can't think of any example where X might be say 87% part of the reason for Y.
Saying that it has not influenced the population problem is equivalent to not living in reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
Look it up yourself. This is not a political issue. This is a logistical one and it is highly verified through science.
I don't think there's a large constituency in this thread who's in support of "manufacture" of dogs in the sense of things like puppy mills. But that isn't what we're talking about with shelter dogs. Nor are dogs simply going to cease existing if we decide as a society that we don't want to continue our relationship with them.
I don't have as much first-hand experience with puppies, but with kittens, the mom cat is done with them and ready to move on with her life before the kittens get adopted.
By explicitly calling out that "[they] are wonderful for children" you are implicitly calling into question their value for adults. Whether that was your intention or not, it's certainly how I read your statement.
This quote heavily implies pets are bad for adults. Maybe it wasn't your intent.
No, he's saying that having a puppy is something a child does, something that's normal for children. If you're doing things that only children should be doing, you are infantilizing yourself (changing your brain in ways that prevents you from growing up properly).
i'm not a fan of housecats (based on their environmental impact) but i'm not going to hold them individually responsible or liable for things they legally cannot partake in (murder).
Dogs took advantage of this situation and they evolved to hijack our paternal and maternal instincts. Now there is selection pressure. But note dogs reproduce much much faster than humans so this will be an evolutionary arms race where dogs get cuter and humans become less interested in dogs. The first round comes when the people who have dogs instead of kids fail to reproduce. Also Expect an increase in dog allergies over time.
Additionally, your examples are passive. A more appropriate comparison would be "Would you not be more sad about killing a human child instead of a cow?" Of course you would be! But what if you didn't have to do either?
By extension, what makes cows more precious than 800 lb. of algal scum? Heck, the scum at least is reducing CO2 content; cows support global warming.
Who's precious now???
I don't think there's any secret to writing well beyond:
1. Write a whole lot.
2. Reflect on the writing and iterate.
Probably the most helpful thing that's taught me to write better (without intending it to be that way) is spending years and years on Reddit and HN, writing thousands of comments. Seeing which ones resonate with people and how is an effective training ground for getting better at making sentences that work.
The parent-child relationship is asymmetric in ways that are often not as visible to the child as they are a parent. There's a reason why for generations, parents have been responding to their childrens' arguments with "when you're a parent, you'll understand".
My comment was another counter example to the GP's statement: "if you can be loving and empathetic to a dog, you can surely began to be that way to humans."
So the point is loving dogs doesn't necessarily correlate with being loving towards humans. That doesn't say anything about what loving dogs does correlate with.
That's very different from what you seem to be implying.
Third places and opportunities to meet people are greatly reduced because everything's taken over by venture capital chains and so expensive, and even if you meet someone the odds of the two of you making enough money to afford to raise a child is low.
If you have that money, you're probably educated enough to see that life for your child will be significantly worse than life for you right now - the rise of authoritarianism, climate change, the active ongoing destruction of American economic power and soft political power, the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, disinformation causing massive chunks of the country to oppose science, education, and other things, discrimination based on gender and race....we're in for some very hard times and it takes a certain mindset to decide that you want to subject a child you love to all of it.
It's not the dogs.
Sperm getting launched into socks or condoms instead of vaginas, not enough money and maternal instincts being assuaged by puppies all contributes to the problem.
The mechanisms that force the population to expand are designed to go against our judgement. Sexual instincts, birth control and maternal instincts are all designed to override our judgement and push the population forward at the detriment of of the human individual. Are you poor? Evolution does not give a fuck, it designed you to be horny and to have maternal instincts so you will increase the population no matter how fucked up your situation is.
But thanks to modern technology we've learned to conquer these things. Puppies, condoms and porn. All contributors to the issue.
Bro, I own a dog. I love dogs and condoms. Doesn't mean I'm going to let my love of dogs and condoms cloud my objective reasoning. Also I'm still going to use a condom when I fuck some random hot girl because my individual situation is more important To Me then the overall population problem. It's called the tragedy of the commons.
People who grow up even on small, non-factory farms see these animals as products for sale or economic assets, not companions. And even the dogs and cats are likely to be utilized for work as much as companionship.
You don't have to go a hundred years - most non-western societies look at western fascination with dogs and pets with horror, especially when couples with low rates of marriage, population collapse etc.
Any example of a dog offering a benefit other than satisfying maternal urges contradicts that statement.
In addition to the non-maternal urge satisfying benefits he named I'll give another: protecting human children. When I was around 4 our dog stopped me from going and picking up a rattlesnake. The dog blocked me from getting closer to the snake and barked until my Mom came to investigate.
Obviously from other perspectives it’s different or else why would someone even own a dog if it had zero benefit?
It's about dogs as a replacement for children which anecdotally I have definitely seen happening. I've met more than one married couple who are proud about not wanting kids but own a dog and treat it to an absurd degree like one would treat a toddler including but not limited to talking to / about it like one would to their child (imagine the kind of coworker who loves to talk your ear off to you about every single little detail of their child's life, complete with photos, but with a dog), cooking for and feeding it like a child (not just putting a dog bowl out on the floor), hiring babysitters when they go out, taking it to daycare centers for dogs, planning activities for/around it, doting on it like a child (dressing it up, carting it around in a baby stroller on walks) etc. etc.
It's a world of a difference from simply owning and taking care of a dog. It's a perpetual simulation of human childcare projected onto a dog that never "grows up" and without all the struggles and ugly situations that might happen with a real toddler ie tantrums.
> I've met more than one married couple who are proud about not wanting kids but own a dog and treat it to an absurd degree like one would treat a toddler.
My first reaction to this kind of comment is "mind your own business." People are way too up in other peoples personal affairs these days. I'm not saying this to you specifically, you were just clarifying the discussion, but in general.
But on a societal level I think it's absolutely okay to look around and say, "Hey, have you noticed the <insert something out of the ordinary> behavior that's starting to happen? What's causing that? How did it become normalized? Is that something we should readily accept?"
Such cases can absolutely be symptoms of larger societal problems and we shouldn't brush them away without examining them first.
I can't speak for the original commentator, but my own experience is one of trying to mind my own business and having this experience thrust upon me by people who are very excited about their pets.
I guess I'd like people to keep their pets to themselves the way I keep my kids to myself: if someone asks I'm generally happy to talk about them, otherwise I don't volunteer information.
The /r/petfree subreddit is hysterical in the opposite direction at times but there is some fascinating content on there sometimes. An example: a social media post of someone mourning their child's death, folks commenting about the death of their pets as if it were comparable:
https://www.reddit.com/r/petfree/comments/1kzlt3o/people_arg...
> My three year old killed by a drunk driver. A lady said I know how you feel, my dog died last year
> Idk about you but I loved my dogs more than anything. I felt guilty for a long time bc I sobbed for days after each was put down but didn't cry at my cousin or grandfather's funeral
> I loved my dog and mom exactly the same, and their deaths both felt the same
> It's been scientifically proven that a dog death can effect you more than a human one
Leaving work early to deal with kid(/dog) stuff, public spaces tolerating the presence of your loud, annoying, not-that-clean kid(/dog), an expectation of urban spaces providing places for your kid(/dog) to go to the bathroom. Etc.
That's why they're called "breeds", because humans bred them.
They're bred for cuteness, violence, but mostly they're bred for profit.
The "pet industry" is a rapid growth segment of the economy. If a pet is "part of the family", then isn't the "pet industry" basically a slave trade?
It's a 1000x speed up to have humans picking out the cute ones and deliberately forcing this forward to make money.
You have to realize that it's our own instincts driving this forward and if it detriments humanity then the traits of "seeking profit" or "seeking cuteness" become subject to natural selection. These traits will go away with time.
We absolutely don't deserve them.
With no cognitive dissonance, I can also recognize that some dogs can be dangerous, and in extreme cases, need to be put down. However, I would point out that the vast majority of misbehaved dogs can and should be trained out of their bad behavior, so it's nearly always their owners' responsibilities.
GP was referring to this group of people whose lives consist of only work and their pets. Clearly you do not fall into this group. In fact, given your lifestyle (a healthy, balanced one), I'd say a pet has great potential to further enhance personal development.
What I've seen is they aren't getting into real relationships or developing hobbies, and are instead becoming attached to their pets. I know it's dismal but the loneliness associated with being single is supposed to motivate you into improving yourself and finding a partner. By spending money and a few hours a day with your pet, you're not doing other (potentially more real) things.
Some objective things having a dog has forced me to do:
* I go outside more often * I meet more people outside and many have become friends * I have a schedule every day
* I mean take good care of the dog obviously. It's not just a tool to improve your love life. But like if you genuinely think dog ownership is holding people back from romance, you really don't know how things work.
The demographic problem is causally related to the population problem. There’s also no other way to logically categorize it.
A demographic problem means we have too little young people and too many old people. How does that even logically happen?
It happens because one demographic is not reproducing fast enough. _That_ is intrinsically a population problem. This is just derived from pure logic… outside of logic you can derive the same from numerous pieces evidence where this issue is totally evidence and unequivocally obvious for people who study the population.
A declining population would not inherently be a problem. Low population growth is a concern only in that it is associated with a demographic problem, but the demographic problem is itself a problem only in that it raises concerns about how to support lots of elderly people, and there are many solutions there, only some of which involve higher population growth (for instance, increased taxation, increased automation, raised retirement ages, etc etc). And it is inherently a _temporary_ problem; eventually birth rates will stabilise at a new normal (this may already be happening in many places), the bulge in the population chart will age out, and normality will resume at a lower base.
This isn't even _that_ novel; major wars, for instance, tend to produce a temporary deficit of working age people vs elderly, as do certain disease epidemic (the 1918 flu pandemic preferentially killed young people, for instance).
Some people seem to extrapolate low population increase to _human extinction_ or something, but this really makes very little sense; lower birth rates doesn't mean _zero_ birth rates.
It doesn't count if it merely says "population is decreasing"; that's assuming the premise.
There is ONLY a problem if it contradicts a desirable goal - and by your post, that goal is apparently universal. Good luck with that.
The anthem of people spewing bullshit across the internet for 30 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline
https://youtu.be/SdeoAgH-H_o?si=1-T1SGNZUyTFCFKP
https://youtu.be/kAolCH_yXwI?si=5wOqB3xxy1e2rayu
https://youtu.be/nms4BMOuDeE?si=auCl7FbXjQ-vnLED
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/population-declin...
https://www.iflscience.com/global-population-growth-is-rapid...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11227040/
https://www.science.org/content/article/population-tipping-p...
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/population-dec...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04868-y
https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population#:~:text=The%2...
The last link is from the UN. There’s even a link from Nature.
If you think population decline is political propaganda from right wing people then you are profoundly ignorant. The situation is well known factually by both sides as a logistical issue. The first countries hitting these problems are in Asia. Korea and Japan are facing the brunt of the problem head on before the rest of the westernized world faces it. The US hasn’t gotten the negative side effects of it yet as a lot of the decline is held up by immigration.
Stop being emotional. Stop being angry. I own a dog myself but that does not mean I don’t face biological and logistical reality.
There is no point in talking to them once you have identified them.
In fact, things like taking my dog for a walk is a pure positive. I get exercise and sometimes my family comes along for the walk too. That's a boost to my family's health and relationships enabled by the context of caring for the dog. So trying to portray dog ownership as a pure energy drain is just not true.
There is a positive environmental and energy impact but in general the sentiment is that this is a problem.
Read about it. Look it up. Get with the program before running your mouth with made up stuff.
That being said every expert who talks about this or studies it refers to this as a problem. Everyone. You’re on a sinking ship trying to not look like an idiot and you’re failing. It’s more than just a demographic problem. It’s a major economic problem even when looked at independent from the demographic issue.
When did I extrapolate extinction or zero birth rate? Don’t be an idiot. zero birth rate means nobody is having kids. If one person out of 10 billion people has a kid then the birth rate is positive. Only a genius can come up with a statement like zero birth rate.
What the hell is up with your underscores? “_that_” as if you know what you are talking about. You said this isn’t “_that_ novel”? Are you kidding? Every major expert or study classifies our declining birth rate as completely novel. Unprecedented in the history of mankind. Nobody knows the exact cause and nobody knows where it will lead.
In general it is associated with the cultural and technological shift in human civilization that has never happened before throughout human history. Modern technology, women’s rights, birth control, the way we live. The current way we live represents about 1 percent of our collective history and we’ve never lived this way for 99 percent of our history. For most of human civilization we couldn’t afford to raise a freaking dog because doing so would compromise our survival. Things have changed and we are very sure that the changes are related to declining population but we cannot point to an exact causal source.
Wake up. Go educate yourself about the issue extensively and learn about anthropology and the economy before pretending you know what you’re talking about.
Science will also always intersect with your love of dogs, liberal beliefs or conservative values. Ignore the morals when judging truth as truth is independent of right and wrong. Then when you have clarity about what’s going on you’ll gain the ability to interpret reality for what it is rather then blindly fighting for some ideology.
For example, I love dogs. But that doesn’t change the fact that dogs offer virtually no evolutionary benefit to humans. If you want to solve the population issue without harming your dogs then address the issue truthfully rather through some misguided attempt to protect man’s best friend by making up bs.
If, in a couple of centuries, the world's population is, say, 3 billion, then, provided that they've weathered the economic stresses around pensions etc., why is that a problem?
Personally, I'm far from a dog enthusiast. My reasons for questioning you on this are in no way related to dogs.
> You said this isn’t “_that_ novel”? Are you kidding?
I was referring to a shortfall in working-age vs non-working-age population (for reasons other than low growth; disease or war generally, though if you go back a bit further famines sometimes also cause a similar distortion) not being that novel. And the working/non-working ratio is the only _real_ concern that I can see here.
https://www.newsweek.com/japan-south-korea-face-population-d...
Look it up. This problem is everywhere, it's very public. It's not some obscure problem I dug up.
Also you're talking about hypotheticals in a couple of centuries. The problems being discussed are ones we will be facing within our lifetimes.
If you want to debate me I'm done talking. But if you want to learn more, go look it up. There's entire podcasts talking about this problem.
Which shows how ignorant he is.