> Even kids aren't this much of a difficulty.
That's assuming daycare, i.e. letting someone else take care of them at a significant price ("51% of parents say they spend more than 20% of their household income on child care"), or that they're old enough they can do things on their own, like get themselves to school and go to the bathroom on their own.
The main reason I went home is to not force my dogs to have to either pee in the house or go 9+ hours without going to the bathroom. They're not capable of using the toilet in my bathroom or letting themselves outside, unlike people.
And I don't want to force them to be outside the entire time I'm gone either, there's too much risk of bad things happening (one being the coyotes that are in the prairie beyond our fence, we have several hawks in the area so hawk attacks, which happened to our next door neighbor's dog, bad behavior from neighbors -- one neighbor was talking about kids that kept opening their gates and letting their dogs loose in the neighborhood for example, also prolonged exposure to heat, cold, or storms, etc)
[1]: https://www.care.com/c/how-much-does-child-care-cost/
> Why do people want such an inconvenient and expensive pet?
My dogs are much less expensive than children, yet people still have those. And I work from home so I don't have to pay for doggie daycare.
It wasn't inconvenient at all when we first got our dogs. I worked much closer to home (just a 7 minute drive), and my girlfriend (now wife) worked from home most days anyway (this was way back in like 2016, pre-pandemic). Times and circumstances change, but our love for our dogs have not. My job (software engineering) can be done fully remotely and I've proven that the past five years (my current job and previous job has been fully remote for longer than the pandemic also), so there's no reason to compromise on giving up a loved member of the family (and risk something terrible happening to them on top of that) just for the sake of a job.
The period of time where I had to make that long drive every day was only about 8 months, by the way. My wife also had to Uber home every day, costing about $500 extra per month, because we only had (and have) one car, and could only drop her off at work in the mornings, but we also did that for eight months, despite it also being inconvenient.
There was a story that blew up just this past week when a CEO in an all-hands meeting praised someone for giving up their dog to return to office, and the response by the general public has not been kind, to put it mildly. There are lots of people who love their pets and wouldn't give them up for anything (short of me being completely incapacitated and unable to care for them), I'm far from unique here.