Pets can have just okay lives too

The internet is full of advice and criticism; how much does it matter?

I have two rabbits, and if you know anything about pet rabbits, you may know that they’re a bit fragile. Their digestive systems fully shut down sometimes if you don’t catch symptoms quickly, so it’s understandable that people can be a little extreme with their concerns about them.

But — I’ve seen this about every type of pet: intense, extreme advice and critique, that ultimately seems to be sending the message: if you cannot provide your pet with a comfortable middle-to-upper class American life, you shouldn’t bother.

The moment I started taking strangers’ absurd judgements less seriously was when I realized that this was the message. The type of lives that some people believe all pets should have are not even available to many humans. “If you can’t give your pet a better life than you and your kids, you shouldn’t have them,” is just not a realistic or kind standard.

I think it is within some peoples’ values that we owe animals more than we owe each other. Those people are entitled to their values, but those are not my values, and realizing that those were the values I was unintentionally holding myself to really changed my perspective.

I’d had this impression that if I didn’t traumatize my pets with a car ride and myself with $500–1000 of testing every time they seemed a bit off, I was failing them. If they didn’t have what is currently more space than I have to roam, if they didn’t get the very best nutrition at all times, if I didn’t have all day every day to spend with them, if they didn’t have the cleanest most engaging environment. Those are things you can afford do do “perfectly” if you have the time and energy, and I absolutely want my pets to have the very best life I can give them — but realizing the best life I can give them might not be perfect, and that that’s okay, was a big step for me.

I heard recently that there’s a strange phenomenon in the way that people really invested in capitalism have this need to optimize everything, including themselves, their children, their pets. We can do that really unconsciously — and I think having been a child raised to try and be optimal, I’ve held myself to that standard too. Am I my very best self? Do my pets have the best life I can squeeze out of myself and my finances? Do my friends only see the very best version of me?

Worrying so intensely about whether I and everything about me and what I’m responsible is perfect isn’t the kind of person I want to be.

So — do my rabbits need to have the life I think I see online? Tons of toys, their own room, my undivided attention and perfect cleanliness (in a stark-white room, of course, because that’s how you denote cleanliness and class).

Probably not. I think they’re fine — people tell me they’re fine. There are so many pets that have a rough life because their humans are having a rough life. And some that have a rough life because their humans don’t value them, and that’s sad — that’s the reasonable thing people are upset about when they weep about animals being mistreated.

However, the standard for what isn’t mistreatment or neglect for some people moved from “needs care, attention, and a lack of abuse” to “needs the best life a human can have.”

Returning to values — I think it’s okay to just not have the value that pets need to be put before people, and often that is the value that people have when they imply they could better care for most pets in the world, if they just had the chance to be in control. We are working so hard as a species to make up for disparities between us; I don’t think every pet of the world having an upper class life is what I value. I just want them to be okay.

Most animals, including people, just have okay lives. That’s enough. We can have okay lives, and our pets can have okay lives. We love them, we care for them, we tell them they’re good. We can tell ourselves we’re good too; it’s enough.

Thank you for reading! Please feel welcome to leave a comment, or if you’d prefer, send me an email through my website: www.michaelzzaki.com/contact.