Life is a disease...
... With a one hundred per-cent mortality rate.
Lately I have been reminded of how much I don't want to have kids, and how much I prefer cats. This notion reached actual conscious-thought potential this afternoon when I saw a clearly-unhappy J'aime hiding in her own kitchen from in-laws and their little childrens. So I actually started to think about why I prefer cats over kids, and began to come up with a concrete argument. I have produced it here for J'aime, whose day will hopefully be brightened by a few laughs.
Kids Versus Cats - by William Miller
Kids - The Background
I'm getting close to the point in life where it's time to get married and settle down. Aside from the actual question of getting married, there is another lifestyle-deciding and potentially life-ruining question that is always innocuously hidden among the minor queries (Where will you live? How soon is the wedding? Are you going to have any pets? Do you want fries with that?). This question is deeply rooted in the evolution of all species and is the basis for all life on the planet as we know it.
"How many kids are you going to have?"
There are a variety of different evolutionary strategies for dealing with this question. Small herbivores and rodents (ants, cats and of course the ever-prolific rabbits) are generally the most at risk of being killed and eaten, and so go the route of having as many offspring as possible - playing the odds so that at least a few will survive. Larger creatures that are less at risk of being eaten (elephants, whales and brontosaurus...es. Brontosaurii?) only have one or two offspring at a time, because of the massive energy required and because they don't need to play the odds.
In terms of humans, reproduction is a puzzle. In different time periods people had different rates of reproduction (possibly based on life expectancy) as well as personal preference, which does not normally play a part in evolution. Genetic threads that "choose" not to have as many offspring as possible relative to the species are often outperformed and extinguished. Not so with people, because clearly even our evolutionarily unfit survive - our society takes care of its mutants and rejects and even goes so far as to give them a near-equal opportunity to pass on their own genetic code. That is, of course, a different topic for a different day. You can't count on predators to pose a risk to your kids (unfortunately), so generally humans are limited to one or two babies at a time.
Kids Or Cats - The Present
When asked this question personally, I have a response already planned out. The question implies that you have a choice in the range of 1 to 999, but I noticed a loophole that can be employed by selecting the number 0. More precisely I choose to mumble, "Don't want kids. Like cats better.". This is a fundamental truth of my life that I realized very early on, and I accepted its implications shortly after. To illustrate my reasoning I will need a volunteer, and since it's impossible to write out loud my audience is basically 1, so you're screwed. Thanks for volunteering. You now want to have kids.
Pregnancy
We have to accurately weigh the two choices based on how our lives are impacted, both negatively and positively. We'll start with "the Joys of Pregnancy" argument. After speaking to family and friends who actually went through childbirth and the period before that, I am seriously tempted to believe the person that invented that phrase was both a man and a man who had never impregnated a woman. The Joys of Pregnancy don't exist, unless you count the time afterwards where you are no longer bloated with baby. But at that point the baby starts crying - in fact, I'm pretty sure that's the first thing "it" does when it's born.
Ok, so I was wrong. There is one Joy of Pregnancy - The fact that the baby cannot effectively generate sound when the lungs are full of amniotic fluid. However this doesn't count as a point on the side of Kids, because clearly the children of people who don't reproduce are much, much quieter.
So I miss out on pregnancy and childbirth. Gee that's too bad, I was really looking forward to attending to my mate's morning sickness and irrational cravings and heat issues and permanent PMS and attention demands and unattractive body changes. Well, at least I don't have to wait nine months to have my loving little feline - I can go get one right now. I'll buy it as young as possible so the arguments are basically equal.
Fatherhood / Ownership
So you've got your baby and I've got my cat. Now we have to take care of them. Well, my kitten demands my attention pretty often by meowing pitifully whenever she's lost or hungry or scared or feels like it, which can get annoying sometimes. I have to feed her every day and make sure she eats and has a place to go to the bathroom, which also involves changing her litter box every few days. She sometimes eats too fast and gets sick, but this is generally on the tile kitchen floor near her food dish where it is easily cleanable (later when she gets older she will have the fortitude to walk over to the living room carpet to get sick, though). She also needs help getting up to and down from high places, but at least she can locomote.
The baby. It demands your attention basically any time you are not in its field of vision for needs that range from being hungry, scared or simply demanding attention (and human babies are very, very greedy when it comes to attention). Rather than a pitiful meowing noise, babies are equipped to create the sound that evolution has decided (correctly) is the most irritating to human ears. This grating, screeching braying carcaphony is capable of bringing any social event to a halt, as there is not a single person in the world that is not supremely annoyed by baby crying (deaf people do not count). It cannot move at all, so if someone isn't holding it and you're not up on the ceiling, it cannot see you and you're screwed. By the way, laying the baby on its stomach so that it can see nothing at all does not work, and will probably get you sent to jail. Anyway, it does this at all hours of the day and night. It only sleeps for a few hours at a time, needs to be fed many times a day and seems to produce waste even more often than that. Because they cannot move on their own, babies cannot use the litter box and so must have mobile toilets strapped to their butts. This is a barbaric and disgusting practice because baby poop is considered a chemical weapon by most military agencies. It is easily identifiable by its neon green or yellow coloring, caused by radioactive contents. Changing a diaper is considered cruel and unusual punishment according to the Geneva convention, but marriage grants immunity to the couple inflicting this torture on themselves or each other.
Similar to waste production is "leaking" - humans generally leak up until about age 8, and then continue to do so sporadically thereafter until age 70 when they begin to leak constantly again. This is the phenomena of various goos dribbling out of your progeny's mouth/nose/eyes, generally ranging in color from clear to yellow to neon green to white to red, and everywhere in between.
Adolescent Behavior
Well, we've survived the baby years and are now dealing with childhood and teenage years. The main change here is behavior - instead of acting solely on a need-based basis, our creatures now exhibit wants and aspirations. My kitten generally will continue to want/need attention whenever I am around, and will follow me around the house and generally try to be in as close proximity as possible. In addition to the social need, she will also begin to display a "scratch" need and an "exercise" need, both of which can cause problems if not handled correctly. The scratch need can result in shredded furniture if my kitten is not given a more acceptable alternative (such as a scratch-post or being declawed). She does not really require additional possessions as she is fully content to screw with mine, sometimes resulting in damage but generally only causing them to be out of place. The exercise need is more entertaining, because she will run around the house like her ass is on fire and do crazy acrobatics in pursuit of flying cat toys and particles of air. She will sometimes make mistakes and do bad things, but if I organize my house correctly the amount of damage she can cause is minimal.
Your kid has new wants as well. It still wants attention, but also has a desire called "trouble". This desire can only be filled by doing things it knows are wrong like drawing on your walls, breaking your possessions, not using the correct area for waste disposal, and in general doing whatever it can to get even more attention from you. Human offspring are widely considered to be the least well-behaved creatures in the animal kingdom (stop and think about that for a second). Note that because it has opposable thumbs, the potential for property damage is unparalleled. These acts of destruction are often intentional, but because human children are not born knowing how to behave, the extremely satisfying act of beating lessons into them is required. Your child also now needs to start going to school, and this is where the real trouble begins.
Your kid also continues to leak.
College and Other Money Issues
Over the course of your relationship you will be required to pay for several things. For cats these can be summed up as Housing, Food and Healthcare. The average total sum of these costs is between 4,000 and 15,000 dollars depending on where you look, and that is for the animal's entire lifespan. This covers my kitten's kibbles, vet bills, boarding, toys, treats, grooming, cat carrier, cat bed, cat door, litter box, window perches, optional spaying, furniture replacement, grooming and training. Most of her worldly posessions are small enough to fit into the corner of a single room, although I will probably spread them out so that I can watch her travel around the house for various desires. Because cats can be trained I don't have to worry as much about the behavioral issues described in the previous section. 15,000 dollars for a creature less than a foot tall is pretty steep, until you consider...
Kids. For having a kid, your money goes into the afore-mentioned categories as well as a few additional: Housing, Food, Clothing, Transportation, Healthcare, Childcare/Education, Miscellaneous, and College. This includes the extra amount you will be paying for mortgage interest, property taxes, maintainence and repairs, insurance, furniture, appliances, groceries, convenience and specialty stores, restaurants, school meals, vehicles, vehicle finance charges, gasoline / motor oil, more maintainence and repairs, insurance, public transportation, diapers/shirts/dresses/pants/footwear/suits, dry cleaning, alteration/repair, storage, medical and dental not covered by insurance, medication not covered by insurance, health insurance premiums not covered by employer / organization, day care tuition, school supplies, babysitting, elementary and high school tuition, books, personal items, entertainment items including reading materials, college tuition and other fees, college room and board, college books, college travel, and other incidental college expenses.
In terms of a family making the average in the Northeast US of A, the total cost of raising a baby from age 0 to 18 is in the ballpark of 658,582 dollars. To put this in perspective, this is roughly equal to the cost of raising 44 cats at 15,000 each.
I'll give you a moment.
The Verdict
So it looks like I have an extra 643,582 dollars. I may not know the Joys of Pregnancy, but you'll never know the joys of Owning a Yacht. I'll catch plenty of fish and sharks from it, and you'll catch plenty of illnesses from your leaky kid's friends at school.
Captain Gizmo XVII looks forward to her fish.
Young and Out of Uniform,
Lately I have been reminded of how much I don't want to have kids, and how much I prefer cats. This notion reached actual conscious-thought potential this afternoon when I saw a clearly-unhappy J'aime hiding in her own kitchen from in-laws and their little childrens. So I actually started to think about why I prefer cats over kids, and began to come up with a concrete argument. I have produced it here for J'aime, whose day will hopefully be brightened by a few laughs.
Kids Versus Cats - by William Miller
Kids - The Background
I'm getting close to the point in life where it's time to get married and settle down. Aside from the actual question of getting married, there is another lifestyle-deciding and potentially life-ruining question that is always innocuously hidden among the minor queries (Where will you live? How soon is the wedding? Are you going to have any pets? Do you want fries with that?). This question is deeply rooted in the evolution of all species and is the basis for all life on the planet as we know it.
"How many kids are you going to have?"
There are a variety of different evolutionary strategies for dealing with this question. Small herbivores and rodents (ants, cats and of course the ever-prolific rabbits) are generally the most at risk of being killed and eaten, and so go the route of having as many offspring as possible - playing the odds so that at least a few will survive. Larger creatures that are less at risk of being eaten (elephants, whales and brontosaurus...es. Brontosaurii?) only have one or two offspring at a time, because of the massive energy required and because they don't need to play the odds.
In terms of humans, reproduction is a puzzle. In different time periods people had different rates of reproduction (possibly based on life expectancy) as well as personal preference, which does not normally play a part in evolution. Genetic threads that "choose" not to have as many offspring as possible relative to the species are often outperformed and extinguished. Not so with people, because clearly even our evolutionarily unfit survive - our society takes care of its mutants and rejects and even goes so far as to give them a near-equal opportunity to pass on their own genetic code. That is, of course, a different topic for a different day. You can't count on predators to pose a risk to your kids (unfortunately), so generally humans are limited to one or two babies at a time.
Kids Or Cats - The Present
When asked this question personally, I have a response already planned out. The question implies that you have a choice in the range of 1 to 999, but I noticed a loophole that can be employed by selecting the number 0. More precisely I choose to mumble, "Don't want kids. Like cats better.". This is a fundamental truth of my life that I realized very early on, and I accepted its implications shortly after. To illustrate my reasoning I will need a volunteer, and since it's impossible to write out loud my audience is basically 1, so you're screwed. Thanks for volunteering. You now want to have kids.
Pregnancy
We have to accurately weigh the two choices based on how our lives are impacted, both negatively and positively. We'll start with "the Joys of Pregnancy" argument. After speaking to family and friends who actually went through childbirth and the period before that, I am seriously tempted to believe the person that invented that phrase was both a man and a man who had never impregnated a woman. The Joys of Pregnancy don't exist, unless you count the time afterwards where you are no longer bloated with baby. But at that point the baby starts crying - in fact, I'm pretty sure that's the first thing "it" does when it's born.
Ok, so I was wrong. There is one Joy of Pregnancy - The fact that the baby cannot effectively generate sound when the lungs are full of amniotic fluid. However this doesn't count as a point on the side of Kids, because clearly the children of people who don't reproduce are much, much quieter.
So I miss out on pregnancy and childbirth. Gee that's too bad, I was really looking forward to attending to my mate's morning sickness and irrational cravings and heat issues and permanent PMS and attention demands and unattractive body changes. Well, at least I don't have to wait nine months to have my loving little feline - I can go get one right now. I'll buy it as young as possible so the arguments are basically equal.
Fatherhood / Ownership
So you've got your baby and I've got my cat. Now we have to take care of them. Well, my kitten demands my attention pretty often by meowing pitifully whenever she's lost or hungry or scared or feels like it, which can get annoying sometimes. I have to feed her every day and make sure she eats and has a place to go to the bathroom, which also involves changing her litter box every few days. She sometimes eats too fast and gets sick, but this is generally on the tile kitchen floor near her food dish where it is easily cleanable (later when she gets older she will have the fortitude to walk over to the living room carpet to get sick, though). She also needs help getting up to and down from high places, but at least she can locomote.
The baby. It demands your attention basically any time you are not in its field of vision for needs that range from being hungry, scared or simply demanding attention (and human babies are very, very greedy when it comes to attention). Rather than a pitiful meowing noise, babies are equipped to create the sound that evolution has decided (correctly) is the most irritating to human ears. This grating, screeching braying carcaphony is capable of bringing any social event to a halt, as there is not a single person in the world that is not supremely annoyed by baby crying (deaf people do not count). It cannot move at all, so if someone isn't holding it and you're not up on the ceiling, it cannot see you and you're screwed. By the way, laying the baby on its stomach so that it can see nothing at all does not work, and will probably get you sent to jail. Anyway, it does this at all hours of the day and night. It only sleeps for a few hours at a time, needs to be fed many times a day and seems to produce waste even more often than that. Because they cannot move on their own, babies cannot use the litter box and so must have mobile toilets strapped to their butts. This is a barbaric and disgusting practice because baby poop is considered a chemical weapon by most military agencies. It is easily identifiable by its neon green or yellow coloring, caused by radioactive contents. Changing a diaper is considered cruel and unusual punishment according to the Geneva convention, but marriage grants immunity to the couple inflicting this torture on themselves or each other.
Similar to waste production is "leaking" - humans generally leak up until about age 8, and then continue to do so sporadically thereafter until age 70 when they begin to leak constantly again. This is the phenomena of various goos dribbling out of your progeny's mouth/nose/eyes, generally ranging in color from clear to yellow to neon green to white to red, and everywhere in between.
Adolescent Behavior
Well, we've survived the baby years and are now dealing with childhood and teenage years. The main change here is behavior - instead of acting solely on a need-based basis, our creatures now exhibit wants and aspirations. My kitten generally will continue to want/need attention whenever I am around, and will follow me around the house and generally try to be in as close proximity as possible. In addition to the social need, she will also begin to display a "scratch" need and an "exercise" need, both of which can cause problems if not handled correctly. The scratch need can result in shredded furniture if my kitten is not given a more acceptable alternative (such as a scratch-post or being declawed). She does not really require additional possessions as she is fully content to screw with mine, sometimes resulting in damage but generally only causing them to be out of place. The exercise need is more entertaining, because she will run around the house like her ass is on fire and do crazy acrobatics in pursuit of flying cat toys and particles of air. She will sometimes make mistakes and do bad things, but if I organize my house correctly the amount of damage she can cause is minimal.
Your kid has new wants as well. It still wants attention, but also has a desire called "trouble". This desire can only be filled by doing things it knows are wrong like drawing on your walls, breaking your possessions, not using the correct area for waste disposal, and in general doing whatever it can to get even more attention from you. Human offspring are widely considered to be the least well-behaved creatures in the animal kingdom (stop and think about that for a second). Note that because it has opposable thumbs, the potential for property damage is unparalleled. These acts of destruction are often intentional, but because human children are not born knowing how to behave, the extremely satisfying act of beating lessons into them is required. Your child also now needs to start going to school, and this is where the real trouble begins.
Your kid also continues to leak.
College and Other Money Issues
Over the course of your relationship you will be required to pay for several things. For cats these can be summed up as Housing, Food and Healthcare. The average total sum of these costs is between 4,000 and 15,000 dollars depending on where you look, and that is for the animal's entire lifespan. This covers my kitten's kibbles, vet bills, boarding, toys, treats, grooming, cat carrier, cat bed, cat door, litter box, window perches, optional spaying, furniture replacement, grooming and training. Most of her worldly posessions are small enough to fit into the corner of a single room, although I will probably spread them out so that I can watch her travel around the house for various desires. Because cats can be trained I don't have to worry as much about the behavioral issues described in the previous section. 15,000 dollars for a creature less than a foot tall is pretty steep, until you consider...
Kids. For having a kid, your money goes into the afore-mentioned categories as well as a few additional: Housing, Food, Clothing, Transportation, Healthcare, Childcare/Education, Miscellaneous, and College. This includes the extra amount you will be paying for mortgage interest, property taxes, maintainence and repairs, insurance, furniture, appliances, groceries, convenience and specialty stores, restaurants, school meals, vehicles, vehicle finance charges, gasoline / motor oil, more maintainence and repairs, insurance, public transportation, diapers/shirts/dresses/pants/footwear/suits, dry cleaning, alteration/repair, storage, medical and dental not covered by insurance, medication not covered by insurance, health insurance premiums not covered by employer / organization, day care tuition, school supplies, babysitting, elementary and high school tuition, books, personal items, entertainment items including reading materials, college tuition and other fees, college room and board, college books, college travel, and other incidental college expenses.
In terms of a family making the average in the Northeast US of A, the total cost of raising a baby from age 0 to 18 is in the ballpark of 658,582 dollars. To put this in perspective, this is roughly equal to the cost of raising 44 cats at 15,000 each.
I'll give you a moment.
The Verdict
So it looks like I have an extra 643,582 dollars. I may not know the Joys of Pregnancy, but you'll never know the joys of Owning a Yacht. I'll catch plenty of fish and sharks from it, and you'll catch plenty of illnesses from your leaky kid's friends at school.
Captain Gizmo XVII looks forward to her fish.
Young and Out of Uniform,