Thursday 1 May 2014

Puppies and grandchildren

There is a dog that lives at Lutheran Courts in New Amsterdam - a bitch, to use the proper term as it was intended.  From stories we know that it has been here since it was a pup.  How old it is or how many litters it has had we do not know.  But she has had a litter now, just on Sunday [April 27], and they all seem to be doing fine.  We moved them into the garage from this dirt pile, so they can continue to stay cool, but aren't quite so dirty.

What I found so peculiar and somewhat annoying is that people refer to them as our 'grans.'  While I may not be quite as ferociously dog-loving as PETA members, I am all for the humane treatment of animals.  But I stop short of adopting them into my family, calling the pups of the 'parish dog' our grandchildren.  I am not related to these animals in any significant way.  The puppies are cute, and the mother now allows us to touch her and even her pups, and we have even bought dog food so that mother has enough nutrition to properly nurse her young.  But that is a long way from calling them our grandchildren.
   Yet we have known people who will call them just that.  Or when they take care of their children's pet, they will say they have the grandchild staying with them, especially if there are no human grandchildren. Perhaps it is because couples are often delaying having children, but not pets, that we collectively have started referring to pets as if they are human relatives.  Or perhaps for the animal rights crowd or childless couples the line between human and animal is increasingly blurred.  For whatever reason, I think we can respect and even love animals without making them part of the family in quite that way.

Just to be clear:  This is our granddaughter, Rowan, who is recently 2 years old and happily [most of the time] living in Regina, Saskatchewan.  She does not have siblings with fur who live here in New Amsterdam.  She, too, is cute, though in a way different from the puppies.  She will not meet these pups because they will be left behind when we leave in another 13 months.  Her parents have a cat which we have never referred to as our grandchild.

Let us not be confused about the differences between humans and animals just because we are more alike than either are like vegetables.

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