Why don't I have a pet yet?

After a long time of banging, marching, and bouncing around in the poorly lit hallways, I pushed open one of the doors and resolved to take a cat with me.

It was an idyllic cat. I saw it on the adoption poster in my circle of friends. It had a black pattern under its nose, reminiscent of Chaplin.

It had a black pattern under its nose, reminiscent of Chaplin. /picture-pixels

After contacting the adoption agency through a friend, I received an "Adoption Requirements": love cats, know cats, understand the habits of cats, such as shedding, scratching, sometimes noisy, etc.; home breeding, not companies, stores, not loose, free, caged, installation of screens, pay attention to the door to prevent cats from getting lost, high-rise residential needs to install Diamond screens to prevent cats from falling; permanent residents of Beijing, have long-term stable and good economic income, have a fixed residence in Beijing, dormitories, bungalows, two or more households sharing a lease Thank you for adopting ......

It's too long. I looked a little weak.

It's like a highly supervised commitment agreement - I'm really afraid of commitment. I have never owned a cat myself, but my friends who visit me regularly have almost every cat, and I get along with them so well that I have the illusion that I am "perhaps a cat genius" after a few visits.

The "China Pet Industry White Paper 2021" (consumer report), produced by the Pet Industry Branch of the China Animal Husbandry Association and the Pai Read Pet Industry Big Data Platform, shows that there will be 68.44 million urban pet (dog and cat) owners in 2021, an increase of 8.7% over 2020, of which 36.19 million will be dog owners, an increase of 0.7% over 2020, and 32.25 million will be cat owners of 32.25 million, an increase of 19.4% over 2020. Since 2018, the size of the pet-owning population has been expanding, while showing characteristics of youthfulness, high income, and high education.

This group of people in turn has put forward higher requirements and more refined needs for the pet market: in addition to live breeding transactions and pet food supplies, the markets of pet healthcare, pet training, pet marriage, pet consignment, pet grooming, pet insurance, and pet funeral have also received more attention. Domestic data research agency Ai Media Consulting predicts that the size of the pet economy industry will reach 592.8 billion yuan in 2023. The growing $100 billion market has also attracted the attention of capital, with Tencent Investment, Castle Peak Capital, and Chaoyun Group has invested in the pet track in recent years.

If the capital market does not have a physical understanding of the pet's favor, there is a more intuitive set of figures for reference: the number of dogs and cats in urban areas in 2021 is 112.35 million, an increase of 11.4% over 2020, of which the number of pet cats is 58.06 million, an increase of 19.4% over 2020, and the number of dogs is 54.29 million, an increase of 4% over 2020. Such a large "user" base is spreading through cities and towns, which means their owners are creating a huge consumer market. The data also reflects another interesting trend: cats are more popular than dogs.

For my friends, whether they rent or own their own homes, whether they are single or live with their families or lovers, pets have become a necessary part of their lives. Even when I visited my young neighbors upstairs and downstairs for plumbing leaks and noise problems, I found that one family had three shorthorns and the other had a trifle.

"Why don't you have a pet yet?" I get asked this question a lot. "Besides, you still live alone." They add.

Irresistibly cute

There was a time when I was addicted to sea tanks.

When I counted all the garden eels, pacifier anemones, billfishes, clownfish, glowing turf, corals and the high-calcium live rock, acrylic tanks, protein separators, auto-replenishers, salinometers, sea salt, LED lights, etc. necessary to keep them alive in my shopping cart and came up with an expensive price of tens of thousands of dollars, I automatically "backed out "I automatically backed out.

When my friend first heard of my fish farming plan, she immediately suggested that it was not an "economic" option. Her reason was that fish can not interact with people like dogs and cats, the owner can get a response that they eat, drink, shit, and turn belly up, "not to mention that you can not pet them". Finally, I chose to raise fish virtually in the Nintendo handle game "Animal Mori Friends", the latter will not produce fish tank maintenance fees and do not have to buy buckets of pure water to change the water regularly, only the electricity bill.

Humans have raised a variety of animals as pets. In recent years, lizards, cockroaches, such as cats, dogs, birds, fish, and "alternative pets" (also known as "foreign pets") are very popular, but also because of the limitations of the imagination and a variety of policies and regulations after the tightening of the results.

James Searle, a scholar of human-animal interactions at Penn State University, has defined a pet as an animal that lives with a person but does not have any apparent function. It's a vague statement that doesn't seem to carry much responsibility, and it's not even necessarily correct.

According to animal behaviorist Hal Herzog, according to this logic, the dogs that Americans used to keep in their homes were not pets, and they had important responsibilities: herding, hunting, guarding, carting, and even churning cream. Cats, on the other hand, were living mousetraps.

In Herzog's eyes, most Americans didn't care whether cats were cute or not until the mid-19th century, when Americans started keeping pets known for their cuteness, first with the bird craze, when the most popular was the singing canary.

Humans have a history of raising lions, tigers, elephants, pigs, cows, rats, snakes, crocodiles, etc., but now when it comes to pets, the most popular answers are dogs and cats. This "furry" victory, or "cute" victory, in the view of animal behaviorists, it is possible that humans project their love for human babies onto cute cats and dogs, after all, "it is easier to empathize with dogs than with fleas. After all, "it is easier to empathize with dogs than with fleas" (Herzog, "Why are dogs pets and pigs food?"). (Herzog, "Why are dogs pets and pigs food?").

When zoologists try to use logic to explain human tendencies toward pets, they find them too complex to sort out a clear answer, and the tendencies of humans sometimes cause harm to animals. In "Why are dogs pets and pigs food? Herzog writes that because humans love animals with a sense of babyhood, many breeds have been bred to retain their puppy status in perpetuity. The baby-like short noses of Chinese pugs and French bulldogs have caused them to suffer from respiratory diseases, and their oversized eyes have burdened them with short, shallow sockets. The deliberate perpetuation of puppy traits in adult dogs not only prevents pets from maturing mentally but also causes them to contract diseases that resemble human psychiatric disorders. However, this phenomenon is undoubtedly a huge business for large pharmaceutical companies, who repackage and market drugs such as Prozac or Bupropion as a new antidote for pet depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

If you tame me

Why do you need a pet?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage article mentions several studies that link the human-pet bond to a variety of health benefits, including lowering blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, loneliness, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms; increasing opportunities for exercise and outdoor activity; improving cognitive function in older adults; creating more opportunities for socialization - -Written like the instructions for a prescription drug.

Scholars of human-animal interaction offer other explanations: pets make children caring and responsible; they provide a sense of security for personal survival in a postmodern state of dysfunctional traditional values and social relationships; like ornamental gardens, pets represent the human desire to control nature; pets allow middle-class families to pretend they are rich; pets can replace human friends; pets and humans can derive comfort and pleasure from their interactions with each other.

Kathy Greer, the author of A History of Pets in America, has said that American society has periodically experienced a boom in pet ownership. The first wave occurred in the late 19th century when pet ownership was seen as a symbol of fulfilling family life, especially by American mothers, who saw pet ownership as a way to foster a sense of love and responsibility in their children; the second wave occurred after World War II when the concept of "suburban housing" flourished and people became more convinced that pet ownership was a necessary childhood experience. The second wave of pets occurred after World War II when the concept of "suburban housing" flourished and people believed that having a pet was a necessary childhood experience.

I asked myself this same question before I went to adopt that Chaplin-like idyllic cat. Do I need that cat? Did the cat need me? Did I need it more to heal me and keep me company, or did I want more to provide healing and companionship for another living being? I made long mental preparations and asked myself whether I could keep my commitment to the "adoption requirements": try to maintain a stable income and living environment, ensure that I can afford cat food and surgery; try not to travel too often, and remember to entrust someone else with regular feeding and cleaning when I go out. Force majeure? What is force majeure? Can I remember to find a place for my cat when force majeure happens and I can't even guarantee myself? I am used to being alone and don't want to put up with another person depriving me of space, but can I accept its intrusion and disturbance at any time?

Sure enough, I got anxious.

Dan Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, once joked that all psychologists should write the sentence "Humans should be the only animals that can ......" in their papers at some point. Herzog paraphrased this sentence, and he would love to write in the future that "humans are the only animals that keep other animals around for pleasure": "Why we want pets is the same as why we have created such complex and symbolic language, moral standards, religious beliefs and a love of choking red peppers. Why we want pets are as much a mystery in evolutionary chemistry as why we create such complex and symbolic languages, moral standards, religious beliefs, and love choking on red peppers (I mean spices, not the band)."

The status of a pet has different meanings to many people. Animal rights activists are unhappy with the term "pet," believing it demeans our animal companions who live with us, and would prefer to call them "companion animals," with owners humbly calling themselves "guardians They want to be called "companion animals," and owners should humbly refer to themselves as "guardians" rather than "owners.

But Herzog feels this is just a way to send people spinning in a whirlwind of language without making any real difference, with many pets not being our companions, such as crayfish, and many people not feeling deeply for their pets. "Animal guardians are free to sell, give away, and even sterilize the animal without its permission. Guardians can even apply to perform euthanasia if they get tired of the animal. So-called companion animals and pet guardians are nothing more than a linguistic maze that allows us to pretend that pets who share their homes with humans also have autonomy." Herzog writes.

Still unable to own a pet

The moment I walked into the adoption agency, I was surrounded by several large and small dogs.

The dozen or so cats in the living room acted even more frightened and scattered as I could hardly handle the enthusiasm that swarmed around me and pressed my body against the door in a panic.

The agency is run by two women who started adopting stray cats and dogs years ago. The personalities of each pet in front of me and the story of how they were picked up are as familiar to them as they are to me.

One of the directors pointed to a beige English short ambling on the counter and said, "I picked it up in winter, it was so cold, it followed me home, otherwise it would have frozen to death." Both young women were cat and dog lovers, and it would have been too much to ask them to turn away in that situation. My performance was, in retrospect, also too purposeful, and I lifted my pant leg and said, "I hope the cat's character is not too agitated; I was scratched by a friend's cat not long ago, and my nails plucked into the flesh, so deep a wound."

Two people listened, revealing their legs, arms, and necks, holding out their palms and turning them over and over, recalling each new and old wound: "That's so hard to avoid. No cat can do that. It's not its fault that it scratched you; one, the owner didn't cut the nails in time, and two, you scared it and had a stress reaction."

The first adoption requirement was not met, which was exposed. I don't know anything about cats or what responsibilities and problems you have to deal with when you have a pet.

A data report released in 2013 by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the U.S. kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals annually, mostly native mammals such as shrews, chipmunks, and voles, rather than exotic pests such as brown mice. Their definition of domestic cats includes both pet cats that spend part of their time outdoors and stray and feral cats that stay outdoors all the time without a name.

As the number of pet cats rises, a large number of small animals die each year at the paws of pet cats, and many cat owners care nothing about the wildlife casualties they cause.

The impact of pets on society is also reflected in the damage to the streets, neighborhoods, and other environments. Roundworms, ticks and fleas, Lyme disease, brucellosis, ringworm, intestinal pear-shaped flagellates, leptospirosis, E. coli, hookworms, cat-scratch disease, Salmonella, and Staphylococcus aureus infect humans who come in contact with them with diseases, and even the number of people injured by tripping over pet dogs are quite large.

A friend told me that he had no confidence that he would ever be able to take on the responsibility of a family because he "couldn't even keep a cat". With what seems like one pet per person, the intimate relationship between people and pets is a topic that more people will need to face.

Last summer, a plan to adopt "Chaplin" ultimately fell through.

The agency operators did not feel comfortable giving me the cat they had worked so hard to save and care for - a person who expects quiet petting but refuses to be scratched by chance. It was better to have someone better at caring for her, needed her, and loved her than to follow me home.

The field cat was smart enough to know about me running to it and kept hiding in the cracks where I couldn't see. I looked at it for a long time in the living room and finally left with both hands empty, closing the door.

A few minutes after walking out of the residential area, its owner sent a video: "As soon as you left it came out and got bored with people."