pets and people

[cellio]

Recently I've heard several people express puzzlement over people who would refuse to evacuate an unsafe situation without their pets. Here, let me try to shed some light on that.

This is a hot-button issue for many; if you keep reading you might be offended. Ok, you've been warned.

My cats have been members of my family for years. Each of them has intelligence, a clear personality, and a demonstrated capacity for affection and love. (No, it's not just that I'm the food-bringer, because sometimes my husband is the food-bringer and yet they mostly ignore him.) They are sentient creatures that have formed personal bonds with me, and vice-versa. Time together deepens that bond, and we've had a lot of time together.

They are every bit as much members of my family as a parent's kids are to his. I'm not saying that pets are surrogate kids; I'm saying that the relationship can be every bit as strong. I would no more willingly abandon my cats than a parent would willingly abandon his kids.

In addition to that bond, I have an obligation to my pets every bit as strong as a parent's obligation to a non-independent child. Pets are not toys that you toss aside when they become inconvenient. I've taken on an obligation for the length of each pet's life, a period of time that is, by the way, comparable to the one parents accept when they choose to raise children. (Except that the teenage kid can probably obey an order to "run out of here right now"; the cat can't.)

So here's the part that may offend some parents. If I'm in an emergency situation and I can choose between saving a random pet and saving a random baby, I will save the baby. However, between my pet and a random baby, I'm taking my pet. I'll do what I can to mitigate, including telling everyone I encounter on the way out "hey there's a baby in there", but I will fulfill my family obligations first. This is not heartlessness; rather it is the opposite, not abandoning those closest to me because they have become inconvenient.

On a practical rather than philosophical note: leaving a pet behind in that kind of situataion is a death sentence, while leaving a kid is increased risk. 'Cause they're going to go in after the kid, but too many people will refuse to do so for "only" a pet.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

You don't think children are also "very cunning beings who we pamper because they have been primed through evolution to push our buttons"?

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

It's more like, we've been primed through evolution to have our buttons be pushable by our children.

But in all seriousness, I guess what I meant was not that pets were primed by natural evolution to do that but that they have been artificially selected to do that. I think there's something to realize about pets -- most have been bred (by people) to be cute and to look as though they are expressing human emotions. We generally don't feel the same way about all animals, not just because they aren't ours, but because they haven't all undergone that process. On some level domesticated dogs are just the dogs whose forebears stuck around the camp fire a little longer than the rest of the pack, then people turned them into toys. Whatever emotions we ascribe to pets are surely there in other animals too, but even aside from the bond we have with them, we ascribe more emotions to our pets, because we made them look and act in ways we found similar to human actions.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I suspect that's getting a little too abstract for living a good life. After all, once the pet exists and you're attached to it, the breeding history doesn't matter much compared to the grief you'll feel if you lose the pet.

Have you heard the theory that there's co-evolution between humans and dogs? It's not just that dogs who could get along with people did better, so did people who could get along with dogs.