As the founder of American Pet Cross (www.americanpetcross.com) and the national SAVE ONE Campaign, I can't help but notice the similarity in the way that we view our parents and the way that we treat our pets. As a country, we dispose of nearly 9 million animals per year at a cost exceeding 3 billion dollars. We do that for a number of reasons: excess breeding, financial hardships, relocation, allergies, boredom, etc. As a result, society picks up the tab for a novelty that has turned into an inconvenience.
We are well on our way to treating our parents in much the same manner. If you analogize a care center with a dog pound you begin to see the point. While there are legitimate reasons for giving up the ownership of a family pet, most of them are baseless and involve the unwillingness to continue with a responsibility that seemed so easy in the beginning. The fact of the matter is that making a decision on acquiring a family pet is an a 10-18 year decision and not one that extends over the Christmas season.
It's interesting that the time we spend caring for our parents in their later years is about the same amount of time they provided for us until we could sort of make our way in the world. The time span of ten years early on gets us as starter human beings up and running. They clean us, feed us, walk us, sing to us, and make sure we get to the bus on time. After a while when we find our own pack, they just make sure we don't run wild and end up having to be put in jail or euthanized.
While some parents delegate that responsbility from the very beginning to nannies, daycare, school teachers and others, the vast majority of us just belly up to the bar and start doing the things that we agreed to do when we brought someone in the world. Those people do the same things with their pets. My experience has been that the same group of people who have no sense of responsibility or duty towards their children have no sense of duty or responsibility to their pets. The same group will have no sense of responsibility to their parents. Like communities with high kill rates for abandoned animals, we will have high costs for abandoned parents.
The result of this "It's not my job" philosophy when it comes to taking care of parents is that parents end up the equivalent of "pound puppies". We take them to a parent pound (assisted living or nursing home) or crate them ( in their house) and send a care giver by to feed, clean, water, and fluff up their pillow ( pet sitter). In one way or another we shift the duties and responsibilities that are rightfully ours to someone else working for minimum wage. The dirty little secret in America is that emergency rooms across the country are seeing more and more older people being dropped off. The difference in ER's and the pound is that the ER's don't have to keep them.
Like pets, in many cases it's not because we can't take care of our parents, it's simply because it's too much trouble. They move slowly, they grumble, they take too long to get ready, all irritations to upwardly mobile people. Much easier to to drop them off with the excuse that things have changed and you just can't do this any more. After all, who would take care of them when you travel.
The difference between pets and parents is that at the pound at some point, when there's no hope of being adopted and your time has run out, you get led down a long hallway and if lucky, a loving and caring vet tech holds you in their arms, caresses you, tells you that they love you but your time is up and you wake up in the big kennel in the sky.
We should be so advanced for our 'pound parents'.
