Stop letting your kids do whatever they want to your animals

I hate it when I see parents buying the kids pets that they clearly can’t take care of. Or when they get a pet and their kids just annoys it all day by pulling its tail or hitting it or screaming and scaring it. If you’re going to get your kids a pet, please make sure you tell them how to behave around their pets and please make sure that your kids will actually be gentle and responsible.

Because at the end of the day, it’s you that’s going to be putting in all the work for this pet. You’re the adult here and you are the owner here and your child is just helping you. It makes me so angry when I see a family with about five kids get small animals who don’t like noise and place them in this big noisy environment. Pets like hamsters, mice, rabbits or cats especially aren’t good for kids, unless they’re are 10+ or older I’d say.

Don’t buy your kid a pet as a Christmas gift or as a birthday gift just because they asked for it, it’s not a toy or an object and it’s a living being. Then I hear parents complaining about how they can’t scratch their child or how the dog bit them, “out of nowhere”. You need to teach your child how to handle pets. If you have a loud child who you know is going to constantly hit the pet or pull its paws or roughly pick it up all the time, please don’t get your child a pet.

Animals have feelings to and to have an animal you need to be able to give them a good life. It also upsets me when I see that people are putting their dogs in shelters or rehoming them because of their children or because they want to replace it with another pet. An animal is a very long commitment, some animals like dogs and cats can live up to 20 years. With an average lifespan of 15 years. So think about the future, you’re not going to just have this animal for one month or even one year, it’s going to be over a decade.

Will you and your family really be able to take proper care of this pet for that many years? Have you thought about travelling and other expenses that might come up related to the pet? You can’t just keep a cat or a dog for a few months and then rehome them. They are attached to you and your family and just like people they wouldn’t want to be abandoned and moved to another family.