You can think about children at any time, if you’re male.
I think a lot of women are simply pet nuts because life has passed them by and they don’t have either a man or children.
I don’t think that anybody here necessarily takes on too many pets, but the pet-as-child-substitute syndrome is a major American dysfunction. I see things like strong, healthy young men and women wheeling a pug along in a baby stroller or an older couple with a chimp dressed up as a baby all the time here in my tourist town. Frankly, it’s sick.
Not everyone is able to have children, not out of choice, but because it was simply a physical impossibility.
Well that might be the case in some of the cases.
I think a lot of other people have needs to fill and love to give. There are a lot of unwanteds out there, and frankly if people do not feel they are up to the task of properly raising children (and God knows look at what we’re dealing with particularly in the black community, with out of control unmarried births and feral youths running angry and wild), I would rather they not have kids and stick with something they feel they can take care of.
I do know that sometimes people are getting their first pets later in life and so the process of learning to take care of something that’s dependent on you has been delayed years. It may wind up with them still having kids, but at a later date after the first pet is old or passed away.
As for older folks, as you age friends die, relatives are more likely to be further away, relatives die, and pets can be great companions for someone who’s lost a spouse or is pretty much alone a lot of the time. People lose mobility and/or have embarassing problems and maybe don’t want to go out or it makes it tougher to be social.
It’s not a cut and dried simple statement I don’t think.
Or maybe they simply have a bigger heart than you. I've had the capacity to love a man, children, and pets all at the same time. Why are you going off on pet owners? There are lots of threads. You could find one where you like everybody.
Those with chimps are in for horrible surprises. Adult chimps are fundamentally nasty, vicious, antagonistic, lethal animals with very long life spans. Their human “parents” will pay in spades for their reckless stupidity.
A chimp? This would make them think twice about that.
A horrendous incident.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/world/americas/17iht-chimp.1.20241928.html?_r=0
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