Episode 84 – The Hands That Rocked the Cradles

I’ve long maintained that at least some of us use our relationships with animals to dry-run human-human interactions. And certainly there’s no shortage of data that indicates that many people relate to their pets as members of the family. For most that means they relate to the animal as one of their kids or, if they don’t have children, the way they think a young child should be treated. What we think about less often is where those ideas of child-rearing that we then project on our companion animals come from: are they passed down from generation to generation?

Or do they come from somewhere else?