They drain resources and get free care while offering no benefit other than satisfying maternal urges which were designed to work on human babies. Puppies are 100 percent part of the reason for the westernized world’s population problem.
I know dozens of couples who were pairs of high earners but one quit their job to stay at home with their child because it was cheaper than paying for child care, but sure, tell yourself it's the dogs.
The economy IS a factor.
But sinking resources into a dog that offers no evolutionary or biological benefit IS ALSO a factor.
There is no other way to look at this. You are committing an act of irrationality if you refuse to see dogs from a biological perspective.
Porn sits in the same area. Hijacking biological instincts to prevent reproduction.
We are looking at multiple causal sources that prevent us from having more children. In the same way men use porn to assuage our sexual urges, many women use dogs to help assuage their maternal instincts. Don’t let your emotions cloud your logic.
This article did not deserve to get flagged simply for offering their own perspective.
Third places and opportunities to meet people are greatly reduced because everything's taken over by venture capital chains and so expensive, and even if you meet someone the odds of the two of you making enough money to afford to raise a child is low.
If you have that money, you're probably educated enough to see that life for your child will be significantly worse than life for you right now - the rise of authoritarianism, climate change, the active ongoing destruction of American economic power and soft political power, the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, disinformation causing massive chunks of the country to oppose science, education, and other things, discrimination based on gender and race....we're in for some very hard times and it takes a certain mindset to decide that you want to subject a child you love to all of it.
It's not the dogs.
Sperm getting launched into socks or condoms instead of vaginas, not enough money and maternal instincts being assuaged by puppies all contributes to the problem.
The mechanisms that force the population to expand are designed to go against our judgement. Sexual instincts, birth control and maternal instincts are all designed to override our judgement and push the population forward at the detriment of of the human individual. Are you poor? Evolution does not give a fuck, it designed you to be horny and to have maternal instincts so you will increase the population no matter how fucked up your situation is.
But thanks to modern technology we've learned to conquer these things. Puppies, condoms and porn. All contributors to the issue.
Bro, I own a dog. I love dogs and condoms. Doesn't mean I'm going to let my love of dogs and condoms cloud my objective reasoning. Also I'm still going to use a condom when I fuck some random hot girl because my individual situation is more important To Me then the overall population problem. It's called the tragedy of the commons.
If a dog keeps depression at bay, someone could possibly avoid having their brain chemistry permanently altered by owning a dog.
There are even working breeds with many different purposes. It's not all black lab and American Eskimo.
Any example of a dog offering a benefit other than satisfying maternal urges contradicts that statement.
In addition to the non-maternal urge satisfying benefits he named I'll give another: protecting human children. When I was around 4 our dog stopped me from going and picking up a rattlesnake. The dog blocked me from getting closer to the snake and barked until my Mom came to investigate.
Obviously from other perspectives it’s different or else why would someone even own a dog if it had zero benefit?
Isn't "100 percent" redundant here? In general X is either part of the reason for Y or X is not part of the reason for Y. I can't think of any example where X might be say 87% part of the reason for Y.
Saying that it has not influenced the population problem is equivalent to not living in reality.
Look it up yourself. This is not a political issue. This is a logistical one and it is highly verified through science.
The anthem of people spewing bullshit across the internet for 30 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline
https://youtu.be/SdeoAgH-H_o?si=1-T1SGNZUyTFCFKP
https://youtu.be/kAolCH_yXwI?si=5wOqB3xxy1e2rayu
https://youtu.be/nms4BMOuDeE?si=auCl7FbXjQ-vnLED
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/population-declin...
https://www.iflscience.com/global-population-growth-is-rapid...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11227040/
https://www.science.org/content/article/population-tipping-p...
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/population-dec...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04868-y
https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population#:~:text=The%2...
The last link is from the UN. There’s even a link from Nature.
If you think population decline is political propaganda from right wing people then you are profoundly ignorant. The situation is well known factually by both sides as a logistical issue. The first countries hitting these problems are in Asia. Korea and Japan are facing the brunt of the problem head on before the rest of the westernized world faces it. The US hasn’t gotten the negative side effects of it yet as a lot of the decline is held up by immigration.
Stop being emotional. Stop being angry. I own a dog myself but that does not mean I don’t face biological and logistical reality.
Which shows how ignorant he is.
There is no point in talking to them once you have identified them.
The demographic problem is causally related to the population problem. There’s also no other way to logically categorize it.
A demographic problem means we have too little young people and too many old people. How does that even logically happen?
It happens because one demographic is not reproducing fast enough. _That_ is intrinsically a population problem. This is just derived from pure logic… outside of logic you can derive the same from numerous pieces evidence where this issue is totally evidence and unequivocally obvious for people who study the population.
A declining population would not inherently be a problem. Low population growth is a concern only in that it is associated with a demographic problem, but the demographic problem is itself a problem only in that it raises concerns about how to support lots of elderly people, and there are many solutions there, only some of which involve higher population growth (for instance, increased taxation, increased automation, raised retirement ages, etc etc). And it is inherently a _temporary_ problem; eventually birth rates will stabilise at a new normal (this may already be happening in many places), the bulge in the population chart will age out, and normality will resume at a lower base.
This isn't even _that_ novel; major wars, for instance, tend to produce a temporary deficit of working age people vs elderly, as do certain disease epidemic (the 1918 flu pandemic preferentially killed young people, for instance).
Some people seem to extrapolate low population increase to _human extinction_ or something, but this really makes very little sense; lower birth rates doesn't mean _zero_ birth rates.
That being said every expert who talks about this or studies it refers to this as a problem. Everyone. You’re on a sinking ship trying to not look like an idiot and you’re failing. It’s more than just a demographic problem. It’s a major economic problem even when looked at independent from the demographic issue.
When did I extrapolate extinction or zero birth rate? Don’t be an idiot. zero birth rate means nobody is having kids. If one person out of 10 billion people has a kid then the birth rate is positive. Only a genius can come up with a statement like zero birth rate.
What the hell is up with your underscores? “_that_” as if you know what you are talking about. You said this isn’t “_that_ novel”? Are you kidding? Every major expert or study classifies our declining birth rate as completely novel. Unprecedented in the history of mankind. Nobody knows the exact cause and nobody knows where it will lead.
In general it is associated with the cultural and technological shift in human civilization that has never happened before throughout human history. Modern technology, women’s rights, birth control, the way we live. The current way we live represents about 1 percent of our collective history and we’ve never lived this way for 99 percent of our history. For most of human civilization we couldn’t afford to raise a freaking dog because doing so would compromise our survival. Things have changed and we are very sure that the changes are related to declining population but we cannot point to an exact causal source.
Wake up. Go educate yourself about the issue extensively and learn about anthropology and the economy before pretending you know what you’re talking about.
Science will also always intersect with your love of dogs, liberal beliefs or conservative values. Ignore the morals when judging truth as truth is independent of right and wrong. Then when you have clarity about what’s going on you’ll gain the ability to interpret reality for what it is rather then blindly fighting for some ideology.
For example, I love dogs. But that doesn’t change the fact that dogs offer virtually no evolutionary benefit to humans. If you want to solve the population issue without harming your dogs then address the issue truthfully rather through some misguided attempt to protect man’s best friend by making up bs.
If, in a couple of centuries, the world's population is, say, 3 billion, then, provided that they've weathered the economic stresses around pensions etc., why is that a problem?
Personally, I'm far from a dog enthusiast. My reasons for questioning you on this are in no way related to dogs.
> You said this isn’t “_that_ novel”? Are you kidding?
I was referring to a shortfall in working-age vs non-working-age population (for reasons other than low growth; disease or war generally, though if you go back a bit further famines sometimes also cause a similar distortion) not being that novel. And the working/non-working ratio is the only _real_ concern that I can see here.
https://www.newsweek.com/japan-south-korea-face-population-d...
Look it up. This problem is everywhere, it's very public. It's not some obscure problem I dug up.
Also you're talking about hypotheticals in a couple of centuries. The problems being discussed are ones we will be facing within our lifetimes.
If you want to debate me I'm done talking. But if you want to learn more, go look it up. There's entire podcasts talking about this problem.
It doesn't count if it merely says "population is decreasing"; that's assuming the premise.
There is ONLY a problem if it contradicts a desirable goal - and by your post, that goal is apparently universal. Good luck with that.
There is a positive environmental and energy impact but in general the sentiment is that this is a problem.
Read about it. Look it up. Get with the program before running your mouth with made up stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...