Poop is poop: It's time to legitimize pet parents

Years ago, a woman in her 60s whom I had just met pulled out a stack of photos to show me how she had celebrated her dog’s birthday: in a neighborhood bar, with balloons and beer for the humans and a little cake made of Milk-Bones and chicken liver for the dog. Everyone, including the dog, looked like they were having a nice time. “Is this your only child?” I asked jokingly. She looked at me with a combination of scorn and pity. “He’s my dog, honey. I raised all my kids already.”

I thought of that moment recently when I saw the unexpectedly hilarious People magazine headline: “Kristin Chenoweth slams non–pet owners who say her dog isn’t her ‘baby’: ‘She came out of my vagina.'" The gist was this: Chenoweth, the showbiz dynamo who broke out as Glinda in the original run of “Wicked” and will play the title role in the much-anticipated musical “The Queen of Versailles,” is currently partnering with a dog-food subscription service called Nom Nom. This involves doing a lot of interviews about her relationship with her dogs, past and present. And that, in turn, has led to headlines taking Chenoweth’s joke both literally and very personally.

There’s no question that Americans love pets: Statistics from the trade organization American Pet Products Association released in 2023 showed that 66% of Americans have pets, and that they spend significant amounts of money to ensure they’re living their best lives. But the question of whether “pet parent” is a legitimate identity (something that’s debated repeatedly and often angrily online) points to a discomfort with a world in which pets are no longer part of the family, but the family itself, full stop. The result is a sustained collision between unfettered consumerism, gender-role anxiety and entrenched beliefs about what kinds of love are valid and meaningful.

There was a time when the phrase “pet parenting” was an acronym for a decidedly human enterprise called Parent Effectiveness Training. These days, it’s likely buried in search results under pages of goods and services marketed to enthusiastic pet owners that go well beyond contemporary expectations like doggy day cares, cat hotels and raw-food delivery services. Self-optimizing humans can now optimize their pets as well, with color-changing kitty litter that detects urine abnormalities, FitBark activity monitors and a range of button-training programs to hone interspecies communication; physical-therapy centers for aging and injured dogs offer healing modalities including acupuncture, massage and aquatherapy.

(L-R) Michelle Vicary, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kristin Chenoweth and Shannen Doherty in the Getty Images & People Magazine Portrait Studio at Hallmark Channel and American Humane Society's 2019 Hero Dog Awards at the Beverly Hilton on October 05, 2019. (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Hallmark Channel)

Pets and humans have ever-broader options for entwining their daily lives, routines and milestone moments. There are 23 states in America where your dog, cat — any pet who is willing to ink a paw, really — can be an official witness to your wedding, and a smaller number in which your pet can actually serve as a wedding officiant. A growing number of restaurants and cafés offer dog menus, and at a few, like San Francisco’s upscale Dogue, good boys and girls are the target customers for a menu of braised-beef short ribs and antelope-heart pastries. Human-sized pet beds, memory-foam mattresses and co-sleeping attachments all exist to make sure everyone’s on the same level and getting a good night’s sleep.

Reactions to this new normal have been very telling. In November 2023, the New York Times published a feature titled “When your significant other has four legs,” profiling several women who were quite happy to put down the dating apps and focus on their own lives, which include rewarding relationships with their pets. Comments on the piece brimmed with hostility for the very idea that a life prioritizing pets might be more joyous and meaningful than one spent searching for a suitable human. “This is gross. Sad. Abnormal,” read one. “Great story about taking the easy way out,” snarked another.

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Because birth rates around the globe have been on the decline for more than a decade, trends in pet primacy are regularly framed as usurping the rightful role of human children. It’s not a spurious conclusion: Census data shows that the percentage of women aged 30–44 with no children is higher than it’s been since 1960. Millennial women, ushered into adulthood by the 2008 financial crisis with untenable student-loan debt and a front-row seat to a sh*tshow of school shootings, environmental destruction and educational defunding feel both less equipped to have children and less interested in navigating the economic challenges of doing so. Add in the reversal of Roe v. Wade, that’s turned planned-for and much-wanted pregnancies needlessly tragic, and it’s not difficult to see why starting traditional families isn’t a priority.

But there seems to be some difficulty in understanding that choosing pets in the absence of either romantic partners or biological children isn’t the same as replacing either of those relationships. When women are the ones doing the choosing, though, there’s a thread of real anger at the idea that they are not only reneging on a social contract but rubbing it in the faces of those who haven’t. Friction between pet parents and so-called real parents abounds online, from TikToks that mock people who insist on bringing their dogs everywhere they go to Reddit threads that insist people who refer to their cats as “the kids” are stealing valor to longform stories of bad pet-parent behavior engineered to make everyone who reads them as angry as possible at everyone involved.

Pitting groups of people against one another based on differences in lifestyles and beliefs (like, say, whether the term “fur baby” is ever acceptable to use) has always been a successful way to take the heat off of the political and institutional entities that exert the most control over how well both people and their pets live. There’s been a longstanding reluctance to connect, in plain language, diminished material choices with the global slump in birthrates; it’s much easier to point to overindulged pets than to reckon with social and economic factors that keep everyone from thriving.

The chief complaint about pet parenting seems to be that it wastes valuable love that could go to a human child on a fuzzy facsimile of one, as though companionship is a zero-sum proposition. Even the late Pope Francis — who took his name from the patron saint of animals — had some harsh words in 2022 for adults who have pets but not children, suggesting that opting out of childrearing is “selfish” and “takes away our humanity.” (Spoken like a man who has never had to pay preschool tuition and failed to understand that wiping a butt is no different from scraping poop out of the grass with a hand covered in a purple, lavender-scented poop bag purchased at Whole Foods. Poop is poop, Francis.)

It’s worth keeping in mind who benefits from ginned-up wars about what makes a legitimate parent — because it’s not the people who could, perhaps, once afford to have both children, pets and even a mortgage, but these days are lucky to be able to afford just one. The people who cast pet parenthood as sad or unnatural are people who aren’t actually interested in human quality of life. Instead, they are the techno-pronatalists scrambling to maintain a white-supremacist bulwark against immigration, and the conservative reactionaries like the authors of Project 2025, whose stated aim of “restor[ing] the family as the centerpiece of American life” works by taking choice, autonomy and dignity away from citizens.

Which is why more of us might want to take Kristin Chenoweth’s path and lead with absurdity. Go ahead and Photoshop your cat into ultrasound photos; send your nosy in-laws a holiday card of you and your dog frolicking in the snow; celebrate the relationships you have instead of waiting around for the ones you don’t. Caring for living things, regardless of species, is always an act of hope. But trolling those who complain that you’re doing it wrong can be very satisfying.