There’s a type of person who looms large in culture wars debates, but I am not convinced exists in life. She—usually she—has chosen pets (cats) over having kids. She is a cat lady. Or she has a male partner and they got a dog… instead of a child. The idea is seemingly that these ladies found themselves with two (mutually exclusive?) options, pet or child, at this one key juncture of their lives, and went the furrier path.
Well. It is my theory that there is not one such person on the planet. Reasons being:
It’s possible to have human children as well as pets. The vast numbers of kids who grow up with pets bear witness to this fact.
The people who say “fur babies” are kidding.
If some % of those who say “fur babies” are serious, there’s no reason to think these are not people with children; anecdotally, people who intensely love their pets often also have kids, and if anything having kids increases the tender-to-creatures impulse in such individuals (she says while worshipping her goddess poodle).
Life unfolds in staggered, complicated ways. Someone who gets a dog at 26 may have a kid at 28 or at 38 or not at all. And even they cannot know at 26 which it’ll end up being, because they do not have complete control over this.
If someone tells you they have a pet instead of a baby, or that they don’t have a baby, their pet is the baby, it just might be that… they don’t want to get into, with you, their precise reasons for not having kids. (Assuming past an age when people in their milieu generally have them.) The most commonplace one being, they wanted to but couldn’t. Wild, isn’t it, that people gesture at a cat as the reason, rather than telling a rando about their miscarriages, their 3 failed rounds of IVF, or their zero rounds on account of the cost. It’s almost like the woman who says socially that she didn’t have kids because of her career might have also not met the right partner at the right time, but one of these things is casual to mention, the other not so much. Maybe (silently) assume something this is the reason if you don’t know otherwise, and not that someone has simply channeled a maternal instinct onto an animal because they’ve selfishly refused to procreate. Maybe assume it’s the obvious thing, and not come up with weirdo culture-wars theories about the fur baby apocalypse.
Or maybe they didn’t ever want kids, this is also frequent enough of a reason, and also… completely fine. Is the idea that the world would be a better place with more children born to people who didn’t want to have children?
Love is not finite. It’s not like there’s some category, creature-love, and if you love an animal too much, there’s no love left over for a baby. This is not how it works.
Being an asshole about people’s excessive (?) fondness for living creatures won’t somehow lead to more babies being born. Of all the many reasons someone doesn’t start having kids at 15 and go on doing so until 45, ‘I saw this chihuahua in a sweater and the rest is history’ has never, ever been one of them.
just speaking anecdotally, New York women who mention a 'fur baby' on their dating profiles also tend to have the 'wants kids' box checked; thus cases of *fur baby preferred to child* probably far rarer than cases of *fur baby while still hoping to have a child*
I agree that it is essentially not a zero sum game.
However, the point (I think) most "anti-pet" people try to make is that due to a low marriage rates, women who do, in fact, want children do not have the opportunity to do so. Therefore, scholars like Penn's Amy Wax saying "the future is feline!" resounds.