This is from an article Derek Thompson wrote for the Atlantic last month:
3) In 2003, the typical female pet owner spent much more time socializing with ppl than pets.
By 2022, this flipped.
Today, the avg woman w/ a pet now spends more time “actively engaged” with her pet than she spends hanging out face-to-face with fellow humans on any given day.
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) February 14, 2024
This is a remarkable finding, but I was unable to replicate it until Thompson was kind enough to show me exactly where it came from. As I thought, it was from the American Time Use Survey, and compares "Animal and pet care" with "Socializing and communicating." But there's a problem here.
ATUS always reports two results. The first is the average time spent among all people, even those who don't participate in a particular activity. The second is the average time spent among those who participate. Thompson used the first for socializing and the second for pets.
That's apples to oranges. Here are the numbers for participants for both metrics:
There's another issue with the ATUS data: it reports that only a fifth of women spend any time at all on pet care. However, since anyone who owns a pet has to spend at least a few minutes caring for their pets, if only to feed them, this suggests that only a fifth of women own pets. That defies every other survey in existence, which report that 50-60% of women own pets.¹
So I'm not sure what to make of the ATUS data. However, my guess is that "participants" ends up being a proxy for the most dedicated pet owners, who are naturally likely to spend a fair amount of time on their critters.
There's not much question that socializing has diminished and pet care has gone up. The data all points that way. But I think the situation is not quite as dire as Thompson suggests.
¹It's less for men, but only by a little.
RE: pet care.
Maybe this was left poorly defined. Does "feeding" constitute "care"? For that matter, how about "socializing", which I think is how we're interpreting these results: socializing with animals v people.
A cat, for example, would seem to require much less "care" than a dog, since it's self-cleaning, doesn't need to be "walked" (taken out to defecate etc), often doesn't even need brushing, can entertain itself, and so forth. Which seems perfect for a woman who may be expected to "care" for every other living thing in the household, not to mention the household itself.
Just a few possibilities.
ding ding, many survey respondents probably didn't think of feeding, petting or scratching their pet as "pet care", just everyday interaction and living
My experience with cats and dogs is very different from yours. I have a pet door, so the dog doesn't have to be "walked" and the cats don't have a litter box. The dog, a Rottweiler, is just as self cleaning as the cats; in the 9 years I've had her she's never needed a bath. Rottweilers are short hairs, as is one of the cats, so they don't need much brushing. The other cat is a long hair and definitely benefits from regular brushing, especially in spring. The cats demand a lot of attention; pretty much every time I sit down, a cat lands on me.
Normalize, normalize. Don't older women spend more time with their cats? The population is aging - there must be a correction for this.
Aren't people just socializing less in general? When you are at home (where people tend to spend more and more time) your pets are always there. Your dog is sitting at your feet or next to you on the couch while you read or watch TV. Your cat is sitting in your lap. I'm not a woman but I for sure spend way more time with my pets than I do with any other human aside from my wife.
So even if this is true all it really tells us is what we already know: people in general (which includes women with pets) are spending more time at home.
A lot of people got puppies during Covid. Puppies need a lot of care and demand a lot of attention.
It seems worth considering that in general, people are taking better care of their pets these days. The resources to do so are more commonly available and people have a better understanding of what their pets need from to be cared for ethically.
For example, many popular dog breeds need enrichment to be happy; time spent playing with and exercising them. This idea basically didn't seem to exist when I was a kid; the dog was there entirely for your benefit, and if its unhappy why the hell is it unhappy, it gets all the food it could want and a warm place to sleep and doesn't have to work, I'd be thrilled. If a dog acted out that was always problem with the dog, not with you, and "obedience training" of the sort you found back in the eighties was often based on shockingly cruel methods.
That's all changed today. People take it more seriously. And that's just dogs as an example. There are others. Even cats, long held up as "you don't have to do jack-all if you own a cat" have enrichment needs that responsible cat owners are following more and more.
I used to cook my dog's food and taught him to walk without a leash in the city. He used his body to direct my attention towards a direction (usually at a frisbee that landed on concrete and couldn't be picked up without help) and I used to respond by pointing with my eyes and head movement (directing him to pick it up himself.)
He never had separation anxiety; I used to drop treats in different places on my way out the door, so that he'd be preoccupied with a treasure hunt.
Dogs need way more attention (than cats), but they also return all that attention.
Also weird that they're treated as mutually-exclusive. I know half the country doesn't live in urban hellholes, but dog parks are a thing.
Hell, I used to work with someone who got a dog explicitly to meet women. (To my surprise, it seemed to work.)
Quite frankly, I think a lot of people have discovered that interactions with pets are more rewarding that interactions with people. I've always been upfront with my husband about not making me choose between him and my cats, they win and it's not even a fair fight.
What a *shock* that Ben Thompson made this apples to pears comparison.
In the context, "pet" is a misdirection for "dog". One does not "actively engage" with cats, except perhaps with welder's gloves; they engage with us -- or not.
My cats tend to spend hours per day on my lap being petted and scratched where they itch. I would classify that as "actively engaged".
Among people that I know, an admittedly limited and select cadre, doting on furballs has increased substantially in the past few years.
But I think the situation is not quite as dire as Thompson suggests.
Pet owners everywhere may protest the use of the word "dire" to describe this situation.
Having met several people, this sounds reasonable to me.
what was the point of this article supposed to be?
Declining birth rates might also have something to do with it. I have found that those of us without kids have entirely different relationships with our pets than people who do.
Like, does lap time count for a pet? Like...