WhySoMillennial on Pets VS Babies

Disclaimer: Babies are pretty cool and I’ve rarely met anyone who didn’t like his or her baby.

But have you ever seen a puppy?

Puppies (and actually kittens and piglets and whatever a baby sloth is called) are categorically cute. They can thaw the internal ice chunk of even the most cold-and-dead-inside of us (see Dr. Evil and also my friend Robert). As far as domestic pets go, their entire purpose in the universe is to love you and bring you joy.

I’m sorry to say, but not true for babies. Babies have the arguably more important purpose of propagating the human race and giving meaning to an otherwise pointless existence. But puppies! Puppies are ACTUAL bundles of furry joy. Even their cries are cute, and rarely last longer than it takes to scoop them into your arms. Babies have more advanced brains, so they have multiple reasons they might be crying… leading to more crying overall and generally giving zero fucks about whether you picked them up or not.

Babies also can’t be left alone, like, I’m pretty sure ever. Not in the car, not while you go outside to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes to try and calm your nerves from the crying, not while you attend your work Christmas party. Even with a pretty young puppy, you’ve got an hour or two of leeway. And once the animal is grown up, they can even be left alone over night! See especially, cats, who as true introverts, need to have alone time to recharge.

Related to this argument is that pets can actually feed themselves by the time they move into your house. You can literally leave bowls of food and water on the floor for them at all times. Some maniacs train their animals to eat on a schedule, but why anyone would handcuff themselves that way escapes me. Babies, inconveniently, need you to physically feed them to varying degrees until they are years old. I personally asked my stepdad to cut my pancakes for me until I was about 7, but like I said #entitled.

Can you even conceptualize how much cheaper a pet is than a baby? I did about 20 seconds of internet research just now, and apparently in Canada raising a kid (even a wiener kid) costs around $260,000 by the time they’re 18. I lol’ed that they stop measuring at 18. Conversely, a pet is going to run you more like $5,000 – $10,000 in its lifetime. I can have a pet AND pay off my student debt.

Another win by pets over babies is that people actually fight over who gets to babysit your puppy when you jet off to the Maldives for vacation (which, I assume you can do when you are childless, debt-free-but-still-working-because-you-have-no-retirement-savings and sixty years old). People are much less likely to even want to leave their babies with strangers for a week.

Not being able to afford my own baby might have coloured my opinion on this, but objectively, in the fight between babies and pets, pets clearly have the advantage.

Oh, and both pets and babies can be dressed up as other animals, and I’m not saying that makes my argument, but think about it for a second.