(This is dedicated to Jason. I wouldn’t have written it had he not scolded us all.)
Most pet owners know better. They know that the word "owner" isn’t really accurate when you live with pets, or, at least, pets who have personality. That’s the key, too, personality. You can have the stupidest animal on the planet living with you, but when you come home and they’re happy to see you, when they give you affection, you know that they’re more than just some animal.
There are dog people. There are cat people. There are bird people. Name any animal that is traditionally a pet and there are people who will claim that they are the *best* animal to cohabitate with, but one thing that all of them have in common is a deep love and respect for their pets. I know more people who refer to themselves as Mom or Dad when talking to their animals than refer to themselves in any other way. My three boys love their Mommy - even my son will tell you the same thing.
We talk to our pets. We even go so far as to converse with our pets, creating their end of the dialog based on what the look on their face conveys. We have our own language, maybe related to baby-talk, maybe based in a foreign language, but always specific to our pets. We pamper them, we spoil them, we LOVE them - sometimes more than we love certain people.
They are our children, too. They need us to care for them on whatever levels. We often raise them from when they are babies and hope that they will grow to be happy and healthy and loving. Even when we adopt them at an older age, we strive to undo whatever pain they had in their early life and replace negative reactions with positive ones.
We invest time and money, but more importantly we invest parts of ourselves, of our emotions and whatever maternal/paternal instincts we have. We keep them from harm. We try to set a good example. We make sure that they know that they are loved. Because they are our children, too. They are our children as much as those that come from our bodies and from our DNA. They are our children as much as the ones whose diapers we change, the ones we put on the school bus, the ones who will eventually leave us to start their own families.
The difference is that our pets don’t sass us - at least not with words. They don’t get grounded. They don’t break our hearts. They don’t need the same freedom and they generally don’t leave. Our pets, our other children, when they leave us, it is forever. People who don’t live with animals, people who don’t give themselves so completely to another species just don’t understand that. And when our pets finally do leave us, they leave us forever and leave a void just like any other death would.
And so I brought myself to tears, writing this, surrounded by my fuzzy little boys, because I don’t think I ever really thought hard enough about this to put things into words. Now that I have, I don’t know that I’ll look at the death of a pet of someone else’s in the same light.
Because they are our children, too. Whether anyone else realizes it or not.
~FG };^>
Heh.