by Standerinfamilycourt
“I’m gonna buy me a dog…Why? ‘Cause I need a friend now….”
The Monkees (1966)
Culture seems to have made a subtle shift in the past 20 years or so. Many of us no longer own pets, we parent them. We wear “dog mom” sweatshirts. We no longer build them a dog house or cat tree and relegate them to the back yard with their water bowl and Alpo. Instead, we spend a fortune on their advanced training so that they’re better behaved in the house than our kids were. We no longer settle for the standard spay or neuter job: concerned about their heart health, their bones and their cancer prospects, we’d rather they keep their hormones, so we search a wide radius around our homes for a wholistic vet who will do a vasectomy or an ovary-sparing spay on our fur kids, to the disgruntlement of our regular vet. We buy them health insurance. We’re thrilled to find out that there are ways to feed them where they might live 20 years or more, if they don’t meet with some mishap we can’t control. We dress them up in costumes and take them with us to social events. Some of us turn down invitations when we can’t bring them along. We join Facebook groups on all sorts of “pet parenting” advice. We buy them health insurance (courtesy of our employers, even). Heck, some of us even sign them up for pet sports! In fact, a couple of years ago, somebody dreamed up a new kind of “Mother’s Day”, observed the day before the actual one. (It will be interesting to see if they do the same for “dog dads” in June.)
SIFC will say right up front that hopefully this post won’t offend the many abandoned spouses who are honestly struggling just to feed their kids, in a different season of life, after unilateral “no-fault” divorce was selfishly forced on them. May you never arrive here because the Lord has brought your prodigal spouse home repentant, and born again or recommitted, to Himself and to you, both. You are blessed to have your human children still in the house, as chaotic and difficult as that is making your days right now. Perhaps the information here will be helpful to a not-so-fortunate friend or two. One statistic from 2017 sets the average percentage of 1-person households in the U.S. at about 30%.
“standerinfamilycourt” adopted an eight year old brother and sister pair from a dachshund rescue eleven years ago, in a process that took 6 weeks and required the formal interviews of two other human family members, plus a “home study”.
Blessedly, they were already superbly trained, and came with the full vet records, meticulously kept since their puppyhood by their deceased former owner. At the time, the half-serious, half-joke was, “it’s either these two or an illicit affair.” None of us enjoys coming home night after night to a dark, empty house when the human kids have long since flown the nest, and the spouse prefers to “identify” as a kid again. I strongly suspect that much of the pet parenting not only happens because of the forced-divorce trend, but because so much of that trend is “gray divorce” after decades of successful marriage and child-launching, and also because of the trend of Christian spouses to stand for their ransacked marriages and stay out of subsequent, biblically-unlawful human relationships which no amount of man’s paper can legitimize before God. It can get a bit scary in these circumstances to read all the “helpful” articles that inform us about what our ordeal is allegedly doing to our health and life span.
Since cycling was the thing to do in SIFC’s town, a framed nylon kiddie carrier was purchased to hitch to the back wheel of the bike, and a little “license plate” on the back read: WENR-WGN. Not expecting to see fur kids inside, half the fun was cracking people up as we passed. There is some counterbalancing information about pet ownership and human health, by the way.
The “doggers” helped me sleep better and wake up better….and socialize better as an introverted person, as I expected would be the case when I spotted them online and applied to the dachshund rescue. Even so, this first pair led a pretty “old-school life” most of their time with me: high end normal pet food, conventional vet, insurance purchased only after a really close, expensive call, and doggy day care for the survivor of the pair, since I was really worried he’d go downhill after losing his sister and I was not yet retired from work. I started to put on weight again several months before the passing of the second one, because he could no longer do the walks at age 17 and I was concerned about leaving him for long. I took a year off from “pet parenting” while I waited on the next pair, and since I was by then retired, I decided on actual infant pups this time. Within a month of bringing the little hellions home last year, all the weight magically fell off of me.
It turns out, that in circumstances of chaste estrangement, caring for and having the company of a pet is one of the best things someone otherwise living alone can do for both our physical and emotional health. Time will tell if the benefit goes so far as to substantially replace the benefit God intended of living with our spouse, til death do us part. We can’t control much in our own lives, but we can create a happy world for our furry family members. They make messes, but they don’t try to tell us we’re messing up their lives by not “moving on”. The grandkids can’t get enough of them, which means we get to see our children’s offspring once in a while.
SIFC’s former state even changed its divorce laws last year in a trailblazing way to make sure “family law” attorneys wring out fees attributable to the fur babies wherever possible (since fees from fighting over human children is a market sector that was obviously maturing for them, as younger people have responded to immoral “family laws”, both by having fewer children and by not getting married at all).
There’s a pretty good chance unilateral forced divorce has led to “pet parenting” on the part of the discontented folks doing the divorcing as well. We can only hope their pooches (as well as their illicit partners) fart and snore! And chew up their shoes – or worse.
“Lifestyle” pharmaceuticals gone
to the dogs
God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.
– Psalm 68:6
www.standerinfamilycourt.com
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