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Dear Carolyn: I know you love dogs, but in a reasonable way, so I figure you’re a good person to ask. Is there a “normal” amount of pets for someone to have? I never had dogs or cats growing up and didn’t want them in our home when our children were young.
All my children at times asked for a pet but grew to accept my aversion, except for my youngest daughter. When she used to insist she couldn’t wait to move out and get a pet, I took it with a grain of salt. She did get a dog in the house she shared with friends in college, and her obsession has only grown since then. The last time I saw her, she excitedly told me she’s a foster parent to a litter of puppies now. I’m not sure how that works, but it brings the number of dogs in her house from two to six, and she also has two cats.
I asked if she was going to get kicked out of her house, since her township can’t possibly allow that number of animals in a small home and yard, and she just laughed at me. She apparently doesn’t understand the law or care how this all must affect her neighbors.
Could this possibly be the start of some sort of mental illness? Should I try to intervene further?
Anonymous: You apparently don’t understand your daughter. And with all due respect, you’re the one admitting throughout your letter to things you don’t understand. Which would be fine, normal, great to admit, even, if you used that information to determine when to stay on your side of the line.
It’s okay that you don’t understand people’s attachment to pets — really! You don’t have to understand. We all can be different. It’s actually better that way — more interesting, for sure. So many different shadings to celebrate, too: Yes, it sounds as if your daughter is more of a dog enthusiast than I am. Good for her. I don’t foster animals, and it is such necessary, compassionate and heroic work. Especially a litter of puppies, which means sleepless nights. I adopted my puppy from a foster.
I’ll let that hopscotch us to my next point, your admission that you don’t understand “how that works” — fostering, right? I’ll explain, though it’s a 10-second engine-search away (all the typing included): It means your daughter has this litter temporarily. Till they’re ready for adoption.
This implies — best I can do with the information given — affiliation with a rescue organization. Legitimate ones screen foster homes and “understand the law.” You indicate ignorance of her township’s laws, which seems … healthy? for someone who doesn’t live there. You interpreted your daughter’s laughter as ignorance of the law, too, and maybe you’re right. But I’d bet my spectacular dog that it really meant, “This is me not engaging with you on this topic, Mom/Dad, not one itty bit.”
Fostering also means her dog count will shrink as soon as the puppers are adopted out. But please don’t pin your peace of mind on that, because her pack will grow again, and shrink and grow and so on, as long as she fosters.
More hopping to things you don’t know/understand: her neighbors. Yes, her pets may bother them. Which they can handle among themselves. Without her parent.
We’re beyond issues of understanding here — this is a boundary issue. Meaning, we’re to the point where you’ve spun your aversion to dogs into justification for getting over-involved in your adult daughter’s choices on a runaway worst-case-scenario train.
Now, can a pet “obsession” become problematic? Yes. In a word, hoarding. But her little half-foster pack is hardly to that scale, plus the care is the thing. If she’s responsible with these pets, then your insinuations are not. Especially not when you paint yourself as, frankly, skeeved to the point of alarm by the very concept of animals in the house.
Really, it’s okay to have your own aversion to this, for you — but then you do need to recuse yourself from judging anyone else. Even elses you raised. Especially those, perhaps.
I hope your daughter is mature enough to be fully herself for her own reasons, and not so in reaction to you. But to be safe, given how reactive you are to your daughter’s affection for animals, the best preventive measure you can take is not to attempt any kind of parental correction or intervention. Or casual inquiry. Because the intensity of your disapproval is a standing temptation for even the most honest-to-goodness animal lover to keep proving you wrong. When the proof is in living form, that’s not good.
So, how about counting on other, better-calibrated safeguards for things you admit you know little about? How about trusting your daughter? And just loving that she has so much love.
Link
All my children at times asked for a pet but grew to accept my aversion, except for my youngest daughter. When she used to insist she couldn’t wait to move out and get a pet, I took it with a grain of salt. She did get a dog in the house she shared with friends in college, and her obsession has only grown since then. The last time I saw her, she excitedly told me she’s a foster parent to a litter of puppies now. I’m not sure how that works, but it brings the number of dogs in her house from two to six, and she also has two cats.
I asked if she was going to get kicked out of her house, since her township can’t possibly allow that number of animals in a small home and yard, and she just laughed at me. She apparently doesn’t understand the law or care how this all must affect her neighbors.
Could this possibly be the start of some sort of mental illness? Should I try to intervene further?
Anonymous: You apparently don’t understand your daughter. And with all due respect, you’re the one admitting throughout your letter to things you don’t understand. Which would be fine, normal, great to admit, even, if you used that information to determine when to stay on your side of the line.
It’s okay that you don’t understand people’s attachment to pets — really! You don’t have to understand. We all can be different. It’s actually better that way — more interesting, for sure. So many different shadings to celebrate, too: Yes, it sounds as if your daughter is more of a dog enthusiast than I am. Good for her. I don’t foster animals, and it is such necessary, compassionate and heroic work. Especially a litter of puppies, which means sleepless nights. I adopted my puppy from a foster.
I’ll let that hopscotch us to my next point, your admission that you don’t understand “how that works” — fostering, right? I’ll explain, though it’s a 10-second engine-search away (all the typing included): It means your daughter has this litter temporarily. Till they’re ready for adoption.
This implies — best I can do with the information given — affiliation with a rescue organization. Legitimate ones screen foster homes and “understand the law.” You indicate ignorance of her township’s laws, which seems … healthy? for someone who doesn’t live there. You interpreted your daughter’s laughter as ignorance of the law, too, and maybe you’re right. But I’d bet my spectacular dog that it really meant, “This is me not engaging with you on this topic, Mom/Dad, not one itty bit.”
Fostering also means her dog count will shrink as soon as the puppers are adopted out. But please don’t pin your peace of mind on that, because her pack will grow again, and shrink and grow and so on, as long as she fosters.
More hopping to things you don’t know/understand: her neighbors. Yes, her pets may bother them. Which they can handle among themselves. Without her parent.
We’re beyond issues of understanding here — this is a boundary issue. Meaning, we’re to the point where you’ve spun your aversion to dogs into justification for getting over-involved in your adult daughter’s choices on a runaway worst-case-scenario train.
Now, can a pet “obsession” become problematic? Yes. In a word, hoarding. But her little half-foster pack is hardly to that scale, plus the care is the thing. If she’s responsible with these pets, then your insinuations are not. Especially not when you paint yourself as, frankly, skeeved to the point of alarm by the very concept of animals in the house.
Really, it’s okay to have your own aversion to this, for you — but then you do need to recuse yourself from judging anyone else. Even elses you raised. Especially those, perhaps.
I hope your daughter is mature enough to be fully herself for her own reasons, and not so in reaction to you. But to be safe, given how reactive you are to your daughter’s affection for animals, the best preventive measure you can take is not to attempt any kind of parental correction or intervention. Or casual inquiry. Because the intensity of your disapproval is a standing temptation for even the most honest-to-goodness animal lover to keep proving you wrong. When the proof is in living form, that’s not good.
So, how about counting on other, better-calibrated safeguards for things you admit you know little about? How about trusting your daughter? And just loving that she has so much love.
Link
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LW, there is no reason to think that Daughter's township has any laws about the number of animals allowed on the property. It's entirely possible that the law as written says that you can have as many as you like, provided that you can care for them properly. That's certainly the case in NYC. (This sort of legal wiggling can be helpful or frustrating, depending on what the law is trying to do and who's enforcing it.)
As for "affecting the neighbors", the people who are qualified to talk to LW about that are the neighbors, not you.
Two cats and two dogs is not hoarding, not even when you add in a foster mama and her three pups, provided that this doesn't turn into a foster fail.
What LW needs to do, and what LW will fail to do despite reading the reply from Carolyn, is mind htheir own business. Even if this was a hoarding situation, meddling wouldn't help. It never does. (Unless 'meddling' means 'calling animal control', in which case LW needs much more information than this and that will probably ruin the relationship entirely if Daughter figures out who made the call.)
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Even if her township has laws about how many dogs a person can keep, those don't tend to be enforced unless the neighbors complain--and that's probably going to be either a noise complaint and/or a complaint about the behavior of a specific dog, not just that the person has six dogs. I don't know what Daughter's neighbors think, but obviously LW doesn't either, and she has basically guaranteed that if the neighbors do complain about her daughter's dogs, she's not going to hear about it.
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What!?!?
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You are being wildly unfair to your daughter. Because she makes different choices than you do does not mean she’s mentally ill. And if you breathe a mention of that judgement to her it’s not the dogs she will get rid of. Ok?