Recent Hungarian research generated a slew of headlines about people choosing dogs over having children. Some went as far as to blame it for the decline in birth rates. Fortunately, the study is much more nuanced.
Prof Enikő Kubinyi from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest suggests that the relationship between rates of pet ownership and having children is complex. Dogs don’t cause lower fertility.
Instead, declining fertility rates may be increasing the importance of dogs in people’s lives, with pets filling the emotional space left by fewer children and more fragile family networks.
Kubinyi cites an intriguing statistic. If a woman raises two children instead of five, the number of same-generation relatives (siblings and cousins) is reduced, on average, from 44 to five.
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Fewer family connections lead to more fragile real-life social networks. Family relationships create what sociologists call “closed triangle” connections – situations where all members of a group know each other directly. This builds stronger, more stable social ties. These closed triangles are much less common in friendships.
Somewhat ironically, dog ownership can increase the number of closed triangles, because people out walking dogs or discussing them can develop relationships based on their mutual love of pets.
The Hungarian researcher is not the first to highlight change in the number of relatives. In China, the one-child policy led to the decline not only in siblings, but in cousins, aunts and uncles. There is also a serious gender imbalance in favour of male children, the so-called emperor children.
The one-child policy has become self-reinforcing even though China is now desperate to reverse demographic decline. It may explain why by 2030, China’s pets will outnumber children under four by a ratio of two to one. The estimate came from Goldman Sachs, which says the pet market will be worth $12 billion (€10.6 billion) by then.
Urban Chinese, in particular, are opting for pets. The same Goldman Sachs report noted that in Japan, there are already 20 million pets, roughly four times the number of humans aged under four. Japan’s pet food market is eight times larger than its infant formula market.
Kubinyi suggests that many people do not currently experience an optimum level of social connection, leading to greater isolation, depression and loneliness. However, human beings are hard-wired to exist in small yet dense human networks.
It is unsurprising, then, that humans turn to companion animals, with their capacity for unconditional love, to fill that need.
Dogs are increasingly being bred to have characteristic features like human babies – big eyes, flatter faces and cute cuddliness.
As someone who grew up on a farm where dogs were working animals and kept outside, I admit to being nonplussed by people’s current relationships with dogs, particularly the first time I saw a dog buggy, complete with what seemed like a perfectly healthy dog being wheeled along. Dog clothes, including Halloween costumes, make me worry for the dog. And what pooch benefits from a puppucino?
Pet ownership confers many benefits on humans. It is lovely to see elderly people light up when a dog is brought into a nursing home. But there is something askew in our culture when pets are expected to function either as substitutes for unconditional love, or as babies.
Loyal creatures like dogs are not designed to be fur babies, a term that makes me deeply uncomfortable. Dogs are pack animals with strict hierarchies. The pack leader enforces strict boundaries and roles that allow the dog to relax.
Expecting dogs to act like substitute humans is unfair to dogs and not great for human prospects, either.
One thing that the Hungarian study may overlook is that while it correctly points out that the number of people who view their pets as children is small, it is likely to grow as a trend.
Currently in Hungary, despite multiple pronatalist policies such as women who have four children being exempt from income tax for life, only 6.2 per cent of the population is aged under six. As family sizes shrink and childbearing is postponed, many adults do not have young children in their households or extended social networks and this becomes the norm.
Anna Rotkirsch, a Finnish demographer, says that having children has moved from a rite of passage into adulthood to a “capstone” experience – something you do after you have exhausted all the individualised pleasures, such as satisfying work and travel.
But women’s biology knows nothing about capstones. By the time people feel they are in the right place, or that they can afford children, women’s fertility has often declined to the point where it becomes increasingly difficult to conceive.
Rotkirsch also points out that it has become socially acceptable to say that you don’t like children, and it’s the only demographic that you can ever say that about.
There is something sad about any society that does not have enough faith in the future to prioritise having children and ensure that women are not penalised for having children earlier. No amount of doggy cuddles will ameliorate the demographic catastrophe we are facing everywhere from Ireland to India.
