A Pew Research Center report finds that when adults are asked to characterize their relationships with their parents and their pets, the pets win.
94% describe a "Close" relationship with their dog.
87% describe a "Close" relationship with their mother.
84% describe a "Close" relationship with their cat.
74% describe a "Close" relationship with their father.
That’s right: Adult Americans feel closer to their pets than to their aging parents.
If money is an indicator, the dollars bear this out. Americans spent $36 billion on pets in 2005 — double the amount in 1994. That figure is also double the combined spending on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day (estimated at $11 billion and $5 billion in 2005).
Sure, that’s $36 billion for a whole year of pet care, compared to just two days of mother/father-love. But we’re not that far-removed (in years at least) from an America where dogs and cats ate table scraps. Did people feel close to animals under that regime? Sure, I suppose. Whether adults felt close to their parents in that era is open to discussion.
Whatever. That was then and in fairness, it must be noted that cats leave people alone for the most part and dogs regard us with an unqualified admiration that never addresses our jobs (or child-rearing or marital state) with anything approaching disapproval and, honestly, what’s not to like about that? The animals in our lives are, if anything, perhaps a litle too accepting and that’s certainly a weakness…but, hey, we take them as they are don’t we; because we feel so close to them for goodness sake. Love maybe really is blind!
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I’m not trying to cast this in the worst possible light. After all, the cats’ advantage over the dads is a measly 10 points on the closeness scale. Hardly worth mentioning. Overall, fathers are a very strong fourth. 74%? Come on! Very strong.
Still… This is just a hunch but, if the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons to the third and fourth generations, it’s only a matter of time until aging pets take all-you-can-eat luxury cruises and aging parents eat table scraps. Not all parents. Just 26%. Or so. Mostly fathers who tend to die younger anyway.
For the record, this kind of shift takes time, so that’s not our pets and our parents. So rest easy about that. No one is going to pin this one on our generation. No, the pets in this cruise ship scenario will belong to our children. We’ll be the ones eating table scraps. Unless of course someone figures out how we can engage and hold our children’s affection more effectively than our parents engaged and held ours. …The clock is ticking. Anyone?
