Pope Francis and the Idolatry of Spending on Pets

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My pets ARE family, but they are not “child substitutes” (or spouse substitutes, since I have a spouse). They are family members who happen to be companion animals. “Family member” means they are loved, cared for, not abandoned, and respected for what they are, not made into something else like a human child substitute.

I’m not really big on people who refer to their “fur kids” but often it is just a joke so I try not to get hung up on language.
 
Sorry again about reply to you when I didn’t mean to. I love pets and have had tons of them over the years. Like dozens. I do hate cats now though. Haha.
 
exnihilo said:
Pope Francis’s is absolutely right. The obsession with animals is disturbing to me. The worst part is people value the ‘love’ of pets and give them love more than they do humans. Animals can’t love. Or if you insist that they can hopefully you at least admit they can’t have the higher forms of love which require reason.

I think part of the problem is our low or non existent expectation of right behavior society. People will put up with all sorts of bad behavior from pets. They justify this by saying the pet doesn’t know any better. They are right. But the real reason for the behavior is the pet isn’t properly disciplined by the human. In that way how pets act is a reflection of modern human behavior and standards, or lack thereof.

Said more succinctly, man is not ascending but descending to the level of animal.
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Well…well said.
 
Reminds me of an article from last month where the Venezuelan president tried to get the population to start eating rabbit (rabbits are pets in Venezuela).

It didn’t work because a lot of people ended up putting bowties on them 😄
 
They are beautiful. I liked your story on the other thread about praying for your lost dog to be found. I went through something similar when I thought I had lost one of my cats outside and looked for him for hours out there. It turns out he was in the kitchen the whole time, trapped by accident in a deep bottom drawer.
 
Chewing is not itself important to the development of muscles used in speech. While chewing and speech use the same muscles, they are used in different actions; so, training chewing does not improve speech (specifically, the strength and placement of the articulators). It would be like training running through pushing weights with your legs. There are children who do not chew for years (they do not start chewing within the time period when we expect to see speech emerge and start to develop), as they do not intake their food orally for a variety of reasons. They are not more behind their developmentally-same peers in speech developments and proficiency.

“Soft” foods are already quite popular in the adult population (particularly among the elderly); because of normal aging, an adult’s ability to chew and (safely) swallow diminishes for a variety of reasons including (but not limited to) atrophy of the oral and pharyngeal muscles, decreased reaction time, reduced saliva production, and so forth.

In case someone is wondering, my profession looks after oral and pharyngeal swallowing disorders in North America, alongside speech and language.
 
Sucking does require the use of the tongue and a proper lip seal is needed to swallow milk and foods (otherwise, it goes places it shouldn’t like right back out of the mouth). The ability to move food from the front to the back of the mouth is more related to tongue control, the fading of the “tongue thrust reflex,” and neurological development than tongue strength in babies, since it takes very little strength to move food from one place in the mouth to another (it takes a fair bit of coordination, though).
 
heh! I am glad I live in India where everything is cheap! I have two dogs two cats and feed a dozen or so strays, cats and dogs and I do it very cheaply. I love animals, I also love people, I manage to contribute to whatever pet project our parish is raising money for, pay for my maids children education, and live ok. Animals are God’s unique creation, he must have loved creating them, imagine he made the kitten AND something like the Polar Bear! he must have enjoyed designing these creatures, You think he does not love them? He entrusted them to our care after all. I refuse to feel guilty for loving the animals I look after…
 
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