I think most of that cost is in the last few months of life. When I rushed my cat to the emergency vet because she was in terrible shape, they charged $2500 to tell me that she was dying. They wanted to keep her overnight -- at a cost of $3500 -- and then do scans in the morning at a cost of $1000 apiece. I was looking at minimum $7000.
I asked, "If we keep her here and do the scans, can you save her?"
The answer was, "We might be able to manage her illness for a few months."
I knew immediately that managing the illness meant that I'd be giving them thousands and thousands more dollars. She was still going to die and awful death from kidney failure.
I loved my cat. But I wasn't going to let her suffer just because I couldn't bear to say goodbye. (I've done that once, and regretted it.) I bundled her up, took her home, and she slept on my bed with me, as she always did. The next day, a very kind and compassionate veterinarian came to euthanize her while my husband and I stroked her. She died at home surrounded by people her loved her, not in a cold, sterile emergency clinic.
Veterinary medicine has now become big business, and these corporations are charging huge amounts when people show up in distress with the animal they love so much. Their greed has overcome their humanity. They've chosen to become predators rather than saviors.
One of our cats came home one night with a broken leg which we didn't know until we took him to the vet. The choice was amputation for about $1,000 or surgery for $5k. I decided on the $5k and after several months of recover the cat was as good as knew. However, I drew the line there and about 7 years later when faced with a similar situation that you describe we did much the same thing.
I'm not sure I'd categorize the industry as predatory, but it is big business.
All this is mostly secondary to the point of my article as I didn't buy a pet until after I had kids, a steady job, and a house. I'm not arguing people shouldn't own pets or love them, simply that they should prioritize and understand that a pet isn't a person and kids are more important.
I should add that I was a victim of the 1970s ZPG indoctrination. They were invited into our high school with the sole intent of convincing malleable teenage girls that we should not have children because the planet could not sustain the people who were currently living on it. Unfortunately, I succumbed to their brainwashing.
I'd like to take the opportunity to state that you did the right thing. Not because I think you don't already know that, but because it's often so incredibly difficult for people to do that right thing, and I want to reinforce that for anyone else who might read this.
I have a good friend who... well, to be frank, who put an enormous economic crippling on himself that he's still recovering from a decade and a half later, keeping his beloved pet dog alive *well* past the time where he should have eaten the emotional cost, let her go, and put her down. He did prolong her life for a good year, I'd say, but he spent a truly *vast* amount of money to do so, and neither he nor I are in an economic class that has anything like that sort of thing just lying around to spare. As in, it was quite likely somewhere between 1.5 to 2 years of his pre-tax salary. He could have bought a *house*, I know he did much of it on credit, and I'm certain the interest rates on that were nowhere near as good as those on a mortgage.
And, this is truly a key portion of this, I think: Once she died, he got another dog. Athena was an absolutely wonderful pet, and a joy to be around. Myna is a lovely companion as well. I'm sure whatever black lab replaces her will be as well. I just hope my friend learned an important lesson about finances and letting things go.
Cultural thing. Two main trends in English speaking countries - the English culture of guilt ‘am I doing the right thing?’ vs. the Celtic culture of shame ‘what will the neighbors think?’ You can see strengths and weaknesses in both approaches. Newcomers don’t quite get the balance we use, at first.
That is true. In the east of the USA, in the late 19th century, the Irish were in the habit of showing their status by piling on hacks at funerals, getting fancy coffins with gold handles, masses of flowers, huge wakes in hired halls, etc. The funeral directors were more than happy to oblige.
I know this both from Mark Twain and old family records. The Catholic Church to which most adhered, finally told them all to knock it off. That, and assimilating into the mainstream, did it.
I am a canine professional, with over 50 years experience across thousands of dogs, and yep, that is a huge problem. It's a dog, it's not a child, no matter that they're raised and treated much the same (including, in recent decades, the same lack of discipline and consequent family misery). It is legally property, at least for now.
The whole "pet parent" thing comes out of the "animal rights" movement (itself straight out of Marxism), which wants you to have no pets at all (in fact no animal use whatever; vegetarianism also comes out of Marxism), because "owning an animal is slavery". If pets have the same rights as humans, then anyone can take you to court on behalf of your pet and sue you for everything you're worth, and pet ownership becomes too financially risky for most people to consider (maxing out your credit card doesn't have quite the impact of the law taking your house to pay a court judgment on behalf of your cat). It's a form of class warfare designed to hit people who are immune to the usual race-and-traits class warfare. And they're walking straight into it, because good-hearted people often have trouble seeing hard choices. So far, legislators have not gone down that path, but bills have been proposed in California and elsewhere which would have that effect. "Parent" is a legal term, and legally enforceable.
And socially, those who just want to be "good people" feel pressured not to have kids, but they still have that need to nurture, and pets are still socially acceptable, provided they're all spayed and neutered (because you should not profit off slavery; the "overpopulation" meme is bogus[1]) and you give them everything you'd have otherwise lavished on your nonexistent kids.
Another effect of "animals are people" is that no animal can be euthanized for any reason. The upshot is that dangerous dogs, many with a history of multiple serious bites, are commonly offered for "adoption"[2] by "rescues" -- the whole point is to make dogs too SCARY for average people, because they've all heard stories of someone's grandma getting mauled.
A third effect is that in some jurisdictions (eg. California) you are required by law to provide any care the animal requires, at any cost. It cannot be euthanized for expensive health issues. If you cannot do so, the animal must be relinquished to the diagnosing veterinarian. Yes, that is CA state law (tho I do not know of any cases where it has been enforced).
So: It sounds like kind-hearted people "just doing the right thing" but is in fact part of a long-running plan to eliminate all animal use and ownership. And it all sounds so good to those who just want to be good people, that they cheer it on with no understanding of the long-term consequences.
___
[1] Breeders produce about 400k puppies per year, down from 700k ten years ago and 1.2M twenty years back. About 90% of pets are required by law to be spayed/neutered, precisely so they won't impact rescue sales. Rescues import around 2 million dogs per year, up from the CDC's figure of 1.2M in 2007 (many street dogs, but many purpose-bred for export to the rescue trade, and in Turkey, pet theft for sale to rescues is a cottage industry). If one peruses the financial disclosures required of 501(c)3 charities, as rescues are classed, and understands that "administrative expenses" is charity-speak for "owner's salary" one quickly discovers that rescue is WAAAAY more profitable than breeding.
(Breeders have expenses, and only healthy puppies are salable. Rescues get their expenses paid by donations, which they get by tugging heartstrings over some "abandoned" or serious-health-problem animal that they then sucker someone into "adopting".)
[2] It's not adoption, it's a lease. The contracts all say that the "rescue" retains ownership of the animal. (But you get to pay all its expenses, and in the event you can't keep it, you can only relinquish the animal back to the ''rescue".)
I would have simply connected it to the increased "importance" of women in society. That or that people have gotten soft. Or stupid. See "Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights."
I can see the connection to the animal rights movement. I am less convinced of its connection to Marxism.
Based on my experience in Vancouver, if the goal of animal rights activists is to eliminate all pet ownership they are failing miserably. If anything there are too many pets.
Animal rights activists have not eliminated possession of pets. However, most pets are now "rescues" and "rescue" animals are not owned, they are leased (this has held up in court). So the concept of ownership (ie. property) is already being negated. "You will own nothing, and you will be happy."
And animal rights types (mostly female "animal lovers" but male terrorists) have already had great success in restricting or eliminating dog breeding, and have made inroads against ownership of livestock by making normal husbandry too costly (eg. convincing state legislatures to force "cage free" eggs and prohibit farrowing crates, as happened in California).
Like all other lunacies not ruthlessly quashed, this tends to expand, and then you get nonsense like "tree rights" and a lawsuit on behalf of circus elephants which put Ringling out of business for several years:
[note: you cannot be cruel to elephants, at least not for long. Elephants never forget, and at the next opportunity they will kill anyone they regard as abusive.][1]
But it also went the other way, one of only two cases I know of where the good guys won (the other, it was already too late for the business):
I followed this crap for many years, because it directly impacted my business.
___
[1] Something witnessed by a wildlife biologist of my acquaintance: Working elephants, one of the handlers got rough. Handler was fired. TEN YEARS LATER this same guy happened to just be walking past on the street, and the elephant in question snaked its trunk out, grabbed the guy, and stomped him to mush before anyone could stop it.
I know somebody who was one of these pet parents. She had a rescue dog who had obviously been previously abused and had the aggressive tendencies to match (i know of at least 14 incidents with this dog that included other dogs and people. There was always an excuse, and and she immersed herself in training and dog style culture, even going so far as to open a gift shop and naming it after the dog.
When she got married and had her first child, the dog immediately was relegated to second class status and treated as a pet rather than a child, which corresponded with an improvement in the dog's behavior for a time. But the woman immediately started looking to rehome the dog to no avail because nobody wanted a problem beast. Eventually, the inevitable happened and the dog attacked her kid when he was about 2, nearly taking his ear off. He was euthanized the very next day.
Wow! The barrier for entry into pet ownership is way too low. I suggested taxing ownership, but perhaps it should be more along the lines of driving a car, you need a license before you can own a pet. Well, maybe not goldfish. ;)
The Optimism Bias: Humans frequently fall victim to the belief that they are exempt from the risks that affect others. When seeing someone else fail, people often attribute it to the other person's lack of skill, intelligence, or effort rather than inherent situational risks ("That happened to them because they weren't careful, but I know what I'm doing").
That overindexes for supposed "Bad luck." The United States proves that grit, tenacity, and calculated risk pay off at both the individual and the societal levels. It's why we have more class mobility than any country in human history, almost all of it upward, and why some 90% of millionaires are self made in the US. We win because we strive, and we strive because we're optimistic.
thank you for this - calling out these stupid ways to throw cash away. Unsolicited one time visiting my parents, my Dad started talking about the .22 caliber solution to a sick/aging pet - it's humane and just get a younger, healthy pet. And there was no doubt that's how he treated dogs on our farm.
I have the income to afford my wife's pets but it makes me sick at how much money they chew up, even as my wife can draw the line at some point. My daughter gave up dogs and has 5 boys now instead!
Would sell them in two versions ‘punch 🚹pet parents’, and ‘punch 🚺pet parents’. The first for men, to make it clear that they oppose hitting women for any reason.
The second for women who have a trenchant attitude. There is a large market, there.
Fur babies. There, I said it. my natural genetic response to someone threatening to have me killed If I do or say something is to say or do it. Sometimes i might say hold my diet coke first.
I am not convinced that low birth rate is actually a problem. first, it is the same people who complain about over population and tell people not to reproduce who then wring their hands and cry and demand immigration to make up for all the kids people aren't having. So which is it? Are there too many people or too few?
Second, we have a host of chicken littles in mortal fear of AI and robots taking all of our jobs. I, for one, am looking forward to having my job taken by robots and AI so I can go to the range and go fishing as much as I would like to. Sadly, it appears to be a long way off, if it ever happens. But if there are to be fewer and fewer jobs wouldn't there being fewer and fewer people mean less and less unemployed? Would that not be a good thing?
Let's not forget these are the same idiots who read and believed Ehrlich's Population Bomb, and warned us of the coming ice age, um global warming, uh, climate change that was going to kill use all by the 1980s, er, 1990s, oh, 2000s and so forth and so on.
The same crowd told us CO2 would kill us all but instead it is causing a global regreening of epic proportions. Turns out CO2 is good for plants and they are practically made to suck it up and store it in the ground. Thank goodness us humans came along to release a bunch of it. So maybe less of us will be bad for the earth instead of good for the earth? Who knows?
And that's the point. Who knows? No one. No one knows if fewer people or more people are better. No one knows if population will naturally adjust up and down as needed. If anyone says they know what's right for everyone else, I'll have them killed ;)
If the global birth rate turns around it isn't a problem. If it doesn't it is. Doesn't mean it can't be solved, but its still a problem. One example will be severe economic and structural problems due to a rapidly aging workforce.
I think most of that cost is in the last few months of life. When I rushed my cat to the emergency vet because she was in terrible shape, they charged $2500 to tell me that she was dying. They wanted to keep her overnight -- at a cost of $3500 -- and then do scans in the morning at a cost of $1000 apiece. I was looking at minimum $7000.
I asked, "If we keep her here and do the scans, can you save her?"
The answer was, "We might be able to manage her illness for a few months."
I knew immediately that managing the illness meant that I'd be giving them thousands and thousands more dollars. She was still going to die and awful death from kidney failure.
I loved my cat. But I wasn't going to let her suffer just because I couldn't bear to say goodbye. (I've done that once, and regretted it.) I bundled her up, took her home, and she slept on my bed with me, as she always did. The next day, a very kind and compassionate veterinarian came to euthanize her while my husband and I stroked her. She died at home surrounded by people her loved her, not in a cold, sterile emergency clinic.
Veterinary medicine has now become big business, and these corporations are charging huge amounts when people show up in distress with the animal they love so much. Their greed has overcome their humanity. They've chosen to become predators rather than saviors.
One of our cats came home one night with a broken leg which we didn't know until we took him to the vet. The choice was amputation for about $1,000 or surgery for $5k. I decided on the $5k and after several months of recover the cat was as good as knew. However, I drew the line there and about 7 years later when faced with a similar situation that you describe we did much the same thing.
I'm not sure I'd categorize the industry as predatory, but it is big business.
All this is mostly secondary to the point of my article as I didn't buy a pet until after I had kids, a steady job, and a house. I'm not arguing people shouldn't own pets or love them, simply that they should prioritize and understand that a pet isn't a person and kids are more important.
Sorry I went off on a tangent!
I should add that I was a victim of the 1970s ZPG indoctrination. They were invited into our high school with the sole intent of convincing malleable teenage girls that we should not have children because the planet could not sustain the people who were currently living on it. Unfortunately, I succumbed to their brainwashing.
That sucks. The precursors to the climate cultists I imagine.
I'd like to take the opportunity to state that you did the right thing. Not because I think you don't already know that, but because it's often so incredibly difficult for people to do that right thing, and I want to reinforce that for anyone else who might read this.
I have a good friend who... well, to be frank, who put an enormous economic crippling on himself that he's still recovering from a decade and a half later, keeping his beloved pet dog alive *well* past the time where he should have eaten the emotional cost, let her go, and put her down. He did prolong her life for a good year, I'd say, but he spent a truly *vast* amount of money to do so, and neither he nor I are in an economic class that has anything like that sort of thing just lying around to spare. As in, it was quite likely somewhere between 1.5 to 2 years of his pre-tax salary. He could have bought a *house*, I know he did much of it on credit, and I'm certain the interest rates on that were nowhere near as good as those on a mortgage.
And, this is truly a key portion of this, I think: Once she died, he got another dog. Athena was an absolutely wonderful pet, and a joy to be around. Myna is a lovely companion as well. I'm sure whatever black lab replaces her will be as well. I just hope my friend learned an important lesson about finances and letting things go.
Cultural thing. Two main trends in English speaking countries - the English culture of guilt ‘am I doing the right thing?’ vs. the Celtic culture of shame ‘what will the neighbors think?’ You can see strengths and weaknesses in both approaches. Newcomers don’t quite get the balance we use, at first.
To be fair, these companies are filling a need. If large numbers of people resented this, they would suffer. I think their need is what drives it.
The message here, I think, is ‘need something else’.
It may be similar at times to dealing with a funeral home. You don't have the time to shop around and some likely behave "poorly."
That is true. In the east of the USA, in the late 19th century, the Irish were in the habit of showing their status by piling on hacks at funerals, getting fancy coffins with gold handles, masses of flowers, huge wakes in hired halls, etc. The funeral directors were more than happy to oblige.
I know this both from Mark Twain and old family records. The Catholic Church to which most adhered, finally told them all to knock it off. That, and assimilating into the mainstream, did it.
Yes, it's very difficult to say, just give me a wooden box. What will everyone think of you?
I am a canine professional, with over 50 years experience across thousands of dogs, and yep, that is a huge problem. It's a dog, it's not a child, no matter that they're raised and treated much the same (including, in recent decades, the same lack of discipline and consequent family misery). It is legally property, at least for now.
The whole "pet parent" thing comes out of the "animal rights" movement (itself straight out of Marxism), which wants you to have no pets at all (in fact no animal use whatever; vegetarianism also comes out of Marxism), because "owning an animal is slavery". If pets have the same rights as humans, then anyone can take you to court on behalf of your pet and sue you for everything you're worth, and pet ownership becomes too financially risky for most people to consider (maxing out your credit card doesn't have quite the impact of the law taking your house to pay a court judgment on behalf of your cat). It's a form of class warfare designed to hit people who are immune to the usual race-and-traits class warfare. And they're walking straight into it, because good-hearted people often have trouble seeing hard choices. So far, legislators have not gone down that path, but bills have been proposed in California and elsewhere which would have that effect. "Parent" is a legal term, and legally enforceable.
And socially, those who just want to be "good people" feel pressured not to have kids, but they still have that need to nurture, and pets are still socially acceptable, provided they're all spayed and neutered (because you should not profit off slavery; the "overpopulation" meme is bogus[1]) and you give them everything you'd have otherwise lavished on your nonexistent kids.
Another effect of "animals are people" is that no animal can be euthanized for any reason. The upshot is that dangerous dogs, many with a history of multiple serious bites, are commonly offered for "adoption"[2] by "rescues" -- the whole point is to make dogs too SCARY for average people, because they've all heard stories of someone's grandma getting mauled.
A third effect is that in some jurisdictions (eg. California) you are required by law to provide any care the animal requires, at any cost. It cannot be euthanized for expensive health issues. If you cannot do so, the animal must be relinquished to the diagnosing veterinarian. Yes, that is CA state law (tho I do not know of any cases where it has been enforced).
So: It sounds like kind-hearted people "just doing the right thing" but is in fact part of a long-running plan to eliminate all animal use and ownership. And it all sounds so good to those who just want to be good people, that they cheer it on with no understanding of the long-term consequences.
___
[1] Breeders produce about 400k puppies per year, down from 700k ten years ago and 1.2M twenty years back. About 90% of pets are required by law to be spayed/neutered, precisely so they won't impact rescue sales. Rescues import around 2 million dogs per year, up from the CDC's figure of 1.2M in 2007 (many street dogs, but many purpose-bred for export to the rescue trade, and in Turkey, pet theft for sale to rescues is a cottage industry). If one peruses the financial disclosures required of 501(c)3 charities, as rescues are classed, and understands that "administrative expenses" is charity-speak for "owner's salary" one quickly discovers that rescue is WAAAAY more profitable than breeding.
(Breeders have expenses, and only healthy puppies are salable. Rescues get their expenses paid by donations, which they get by tugging heartstrings over some "abandoned" or serious-health-problem animal that they then sucker someone into "adopting".)
[2] It's not adoption, it's a lease. The contracts all say that the "rescue" retains ownership of the animal. (But you get to pay all its expenses, and in the event you can't keep it, you can only relinquish the animal back to the ''rescue".)
I would have simply connected it to the increased "importance" of women in society. That or that people have gotten soft. Or stupid. See "Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/terrasse-vaudreil-quebec-tree-rights-9.7243634
I can see the connection to the animal rights movement. I am less convinced of its connection to Marxism.
Based on my experience in Vancouver, if the goal of animal rights activists is to eliminate all pet ownership they are failing miserably. If anything there are too many pets.
Animal rights and marxism, many articles:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=animal+rights+and+marxism&t=chromentp&ia=web
Animal rights activists have not eliminated possession of pets. However, most pets are now "rescues" and "rescue" animals are not owned, they are leased (this has held up in court). So the concept of ownership (ie. property) is already being negated. "You will own nothing, and you will be happy."
And animal rights types (mostly female "animal lovers" but male terrorists) have already had great success in restricting or eliminating dog breeding, and have made inroads against ownership of livestock by making normal husbandry too costly (eg. convincing state legislatures to force "cage free" eggs and prohibit farrowing crates, as happened in California).
Like all other lunacies not ruthlessly quashed, this tends to expand, and then you get nonsense like "tree rights" and a lawsuit on behalf of circus elephants which put Ringling out of business for several years:
https://awionline.org/awi-quarterly/spring-2009/elephant-cruelty-under-the-big-top-ringling-bros-and-barnum-bailey-circus-finally-exposed-in-federal-court-trial/
[note: you cannot be cruel to elephants, at least not for long. Elephants never forget, and at the next opportunity they will kill anyone they regard as abusive.][1]
But it also went the other way, one of only two cases I know of where the good guys won (the other, it was already too late for the business):
https://www.vice.com/en/article/animal-rights-groups-pay-circus-nearly-16m-in-settlement-over-elephant-abuse-allegations/
I followed this crap for many years, because it directly impacted my business.
___
[1] Something witnessed by a wildlife biologist of my acquaintance: Working elephants, one of the handlers got rough. Handler was fired. TEN YEARS LATER this same guy happened to just be walking past on the street, and the elephant in question snaked its trunk out, grabbed the guy, and stomped him to mush before anyone could stop it.
Interesting.
Amen! You have nailed it.
Thanks Christine!
I know somebody who was one of these pet parents. She had a rescue dog who had obviously been previously abused and had the aggressive tendencies to match (i know of at least 14 incidents with this dog that included other dogs and people. There was always an excuse, and and she immersed herself in training and dog style culture, even going so far as to open a gift shop and naming it after the dog.
When she got married and had her first child, the dog immediately was relegated to second class status and treated as a pet rather than a child, which corresponded with an improvement in the dog's behavior for a time. But the woman immediately started looking to rehome the dog to no avail because nobody wanted a problem beast. Eventually, the inevitable happened and the dog attacked her kid when he was about 2, nearly taking his ear off. He was euthanized the very next day.
Wow! The barrier for entry into pet ownership is way too low. I suggested taxing ownership, but perhaps it should be more along the lines of driving a car, you need a license before you can own a pet. Well, maybe not goldfish. ;)
Nah learning the hard way is necessary sometimes. Most times, in fact
You assume most people learn from their mistakes.
Most do. In fact, most not only learn from their mistakes but also from other people's mistakes. It's a defining feature of humanity.
I hope it's "most," but I sometimes wonder.
Something to note:
The Optimism Bias: Humans frequently fall victim to the belief that they are exempt from the risks that affect others. When seeing someone else fail, people often attribute it to the other person's lack of skill, intelligence, or effort rather than inherent situational risks ("That happened to them because they weren't careful, but I know what I'm doing").
That overindexes for supposed "Bad luck." The United States proves that grit, tenacity, and calculated risk pay off at both the individual and the societal levels. It's why we have more class mobility than any country in human history, almost all of it upward, and why some 90% of millionaires are self made in the US. We win because we strive, and we strive because we're optimistic.
thank you for this - calling out these stupid ways to throw cash away. Unsolicited one time visiting my parents, my Dad started talking about the .22 caliber solution to a sick/aging pet - it's humane and just get a younger, healthy pet. And there was no doubt that's how he treated dogs on our farm.
I have the income to afford my wife's pets but it makes me sick at how much money they chew up, even as my wife can draw the line at some point. My daughter gave up dogs and has 5 boys now instead!
Not sure I'd go the Old Yeller route but I'm in general agreement.
I am grateful to know someone else rolls their eyes when couples say "We're pregnant!". No, she's pregnant; you're along for the ride.
https://www.kvetch.au/p/against-dogs
I liked it.
Thanks for the link!
I’ll buy one.
Would sell them in two versions ‘punch 🚹pet parents’, and ‘punch 🚺pet parents’. The first for men, to make it clear that they oppose hitting women for any reason.
The second for women who have a trenchant attitude. There is a large market, there.
No all I have to do is overcome my natural laziness and get them made.
Fur babies. There, I said it. my natural genetic response to someone threatening to have me killed If I do or say something is to say or do it. Sometimes i might say hold my diet coke first.
I am not convinced that low birth rate is actually a problem. first, it is the same people who complain about over population and tell people not to reproduce who then wring their hands and cry and demand immigration to make up for all the kids people aren't having. So which is it? Are there too many people or too few?
Second, we have a host of chicken littles in mortal fear of AI and robots taking all of our jobs. I, for one, am looking forward to having my job taken by robots and AI so I can go to the range and go fishing as much as I would like to. Sadly, it appears to be a long way off, if it ever happens. But if there are to be fewer and fewer jobs wouldn't there being fewer and fewer people mean less and less unemployed? Would that not be a good thing?
Let's not forget these are the same idiots who read and believed Ehrlich's Population Bomb, and warned us of the coming ice age, um global warming, uh, climate change that was going to kill use all by the 1980s, er, 1990s, oh, 2000s and so forth and so on.
The same crowd told us CO2 would kill us all but instead it is causing a global regreening of epic proportions. Turns out CO2 is good for plants and they are practically made to suck it up and store it in the ground. Thank goodness us humans came along to release a bunch of it. So maybe less of us will be bad for the earth instead of good for the earth? Who knows?
And that's the point. Who knows? No one. No one knows if fewer people or more people are better. No one knows if population will naturally adjust up and down as needed. If anyone says they know what's right for everyone else, I'll have them killed ;)
Re: fertility and immigration. I wrote about it in a three part series. If you're interested start here:
https://hoisttheblackflag.substack.com/p/demographics-economics-and-immigration?r=26wsm2
If the global birth rate turns around it isn't a problem. If it doesn't it is. Doesn't mean it can't be solved, but its still a problem. One example will be severe economic and structural problems due to a rapidly aging workforce.