Are you a pet person?

 Are you a pet person? I’m not a pet person.

What is a pet person?

Well, pet people believe in pets. They believe that you can take an animal and bring it into your home and give it a personal name and it becomes something more than another animal that is left outside without a personal name. Pet people talk to their pets. Now by talking, I mean that they communicate with the pet and think the pet communicates with them in complex ways. I am not talking about giving vocal cues to an animal to direct the animal. I mean they believe that they are talking to the pet the way one talks to another human. Communicating, not just presenting commands, cues, and such. I don’t believe in such "communication". I only believe in the commands and cues. So I’m not a pet person.

Pet people believe that their animals have complex internal lives. That they feel almost the way humans feel. That they love like humans love. The biggest departure from a non-pet person’s view is that the pet-person believes the animal/pet makes real choices. They believe the pet has a will like a human does. What is a will? A will is that faculty in a human which makes decisions based upon criteria so complex that no sure prediction of the decision may be made beforehand. Pet people believe that animals choose to love their people. Non-pet people like me, believe that any genetically identical animal will make exactly the same decisions as another in the same circumstances. Trained alike, two genetically identical animals will always do the exact same things. Genetically identical people trained alike will make completely unpredictably different decisions. I can’t prove this, but this is what I believe. Pet people don’t believe this. They believe animals make real choices (not just mentally mechanical decisions) that differ from one individual pet (with a personal name) and another. In psychological terms, animals are perfectly suited to behavioral training, while humans are only relatively so.

Pet people believe that their animals have intrinsic value the way humans, ideas, and morals have intrinsic value. Some animal/pet people even believe that all animals deserve the rights that humans do. Non-pet people don’t believe this. They see animals as animals. At their most logical they see no more value in a dog than in a chicken. They see no difference in "killing" and eating a soy bean or a cow. It is all protein to a logically consistent non-pet person.

Here is the fascinating thing. There are no truly consistent people. There is a compete and almost infinitely variable range of feelings about this from Spock to Jane Goodall. Most people fall into an utterly complex contradictory middle range which they never consciously consider. They know that their 50 cats each love them with all of their hearts. Or they know that their dog just loves dressing up in that ribbon. Yet, they eat veal. They coo and bill to their darling parrot and believe the parrot knows what "I love you" means just the way a human does (though to be rigorously fair, not one in a million humans really knows what love is). But, they go to Kentucky Fried Chicken and eat his cousin.

Would you like to hear two very fascinating "pet" stories?

The most common worldwide English name for a parakeet is budgerigar. Do you know where that words comes from? When Englishmen arrived in Australia they asked the natives what kinds of beautiful birds those were in the trees. The Aborigines replied, "budgerigar". This was adopted by the British as the name for the birds, but when actual language studies were done it was found that budgerigar is Aborigine for "good eating!"

A second story. The wonderful little animals known as Guinea Pigs were first domesticated in the Andes of South America. They were pet kind of animals that lived on the floor in native huts. They whistle. They have soft fur. They come in a range of fur colors and hair lengths that boggles the mind. One very nice feature is that they will virtually never bite your finger. Ever wonder why that is? Well, the natives who have kept these critter for thousands of years had a good use for them. When guests arrived in the little hut they grabbed one cavy per guest and roasted them for dinner. Now, besides selecting for fatness and such, do you suppose the last one that bit you would go into the dinner or the one who had not bitten anyone ever? Of course the biters were the first kicked out of the gene pool.

Such is the weird way of people and animals. They are food. They are loved family members. They are just a complete illogical iceberg in the path of good sense. They utterly defy logic and consistency of thought and interaction.

I mention myself as a non-pet person. My family is all pet crazy. When I was a kid we brought home garter snakes for pets, but my Mother soon put the kibosh on that plan for real. She chased us out of the house and killed the snake with a rake. I told my family for years and years that they could not have a dog. So, they got other pets. First a water turtle, then a box turtle. Then snakes, mice, a rat, hamsters, guinea pigs, goldfish (to feed the snakes), tropical fish, there may even be others I don’t know about. Oh, we had goldfinches raised in cages in the basement! Dozens of them. Finally, I realized they just had to have a dog. So, I bought one for them. Daisy the Wonderbeagle was an inoffensive canine. As much as the family wanted her and really loved her I was baffled at how little they took care of her. I, the non-pet person, had to house-break her. When I read about people abandoning dogs because the "stupid creature kept messing in the house" I am baffled. House-breaking a dog is a fairly simple process that is as straight-forward as changing a light bulb. There are steps to take and when you are done a dog will soil or urinate on a floor inside very rarely.

<span style="font-family: 'Bookman Old Style’; “>I will admit that I was not as motivated to train her to stay quietly in her sleeping place at night during storms. She would have awful sort of panic attacks. I should have fixed that, but never did.

Interestingly, no one bought another pet for the house once we got Daisy (as far as I recall). We are now down to one lone goldfish.

Some people who are pet people absolutely hate people who are not pet people. Some few people who are non-pet people absolutely hate pet people. But, most people just like to get along with others and accept that their views are different from others. Some pet people believe that non-pet people are illogical. Some non-pet people think that pet people are illogical. But, most people just accept that others feel differently than they do. Some people spend all kinds of time trying to convert those of the other view to their point of view. It is very much like the atheist vs theist question. I have to admit, that though I’ve never gone out of my way to convert someone to theism or non-petism against their will, I would prefer that everyone were like I am about these two issues. I like my own opinions. Isn’t that odd!?

I am happy that even though none of us see pets exactly alike, we mostly get along with each other about the issues that arise from the pet and non-pet points of view.