I?m a parent. It doesn?t make me better or worse than anyone else, it?s just a category that reflects some facts about me: I conceived a new human with my wife, we are raising and caring for that human, and we expect to have a relationship with him for the rest of our lives. Some people don?t take parenthood seriously, so it doesn?t impact their lives very much, but their kids suffer. We take it very seriously, and it?s a lot of work for us.
I also take care of pets. We own three cats, and sometimes I walk my mom?s dog or take him to be groomed. It can be a lot of work, and the relationships can be very intimate at times. ?Ownership? is kind of a funny word for it. In some ways it can be like certain stages of parenting: we buy all the food and make sure the animals don?t get into danger. It makes sense when I hear people refer to their pets as their ?baby? or put words in their pets calling themselves ?daddy.? I even understand when I hear them refer to themselves as ?pet moms.?
I understand this usage, but I do not agree with it. I have a kid, and I have pets. The relationships are similar, but different. When someone calls themself a ?pet dad,? it trivializes my relationship with my kid and infantilizes my pets. It erases the work of the actual parents, and trivializes the hard work of humans who act as surrogate parents to infant pets. I am a dad: I am not a pet dad, and I am not my pets? dad. Or their mom.
My kid will one day be an adult, and while I may always think of him as The Kid, he will be able to function as an autonomous member of society. (Note that the term ?kid? itself is an animal metaphor – referring to a juvenile goat.) Only one of my cats can still be considered a juvenile by any standard; the others are five years old and twenty years old, respectively. They are adult males, and until the last century they would have been free to come and go as they wished.
If my cats are incapable of leaving our house unaccompanied it is more likely due to the fact that we have cars everywhere than anything else. When I was a kid we lost three dogs to car culture. When I was eleven I saw a neighbor?s cat crushed beneath the wheels of a car, and arrived just in time to see him take his last breath. We have indoor cats and dog leashes in part because we have made the outdoors inhospitable.
I suspect one reason we hear more about ?pet parents? is that so few of our pets are parents themselves. I support universal neutering, and have only adopted neutered cats from shelters or feral rescuers. It?s the best response to the overpopulation of feral animals, but it does make the pets neuter – and childless.
When I was a kid we had a cat who had a litter of kittens. I watched one of our dogs give birth to eleven puppies, and then found homes for the ten that lived. Our male cats were aggressive, sexual toms. Again, not wise in retrospect, but it was hard to think of any of the humans in the house as ?moms? or ?dads? of our pets while they were themselves moms and dads.
There is one human I know who would qualify as a ?cat mom? in my mind. She is the woman who leads the feral cat helpers in our neighborhood. Six years ago someone found a baby kitten near some railroad tracks in Manhattan. My neighbor fostered this kitten in her apartment for five months, feeding him with an eyedropper until he was old enough to eat. She posted his picture on her website and we adopted him. If he has a ?pet mom? it?s her.