Spain is one of those countries that, like Japan, already adds more deaths than births each year. The trend of recent years was already very accentuated, but the pandemic has only made it worse. The birth rate is at historic lows, in Spain and throughout southern Europe. However, another type of living being is increasingly common in homes: pets. Especially dogs and cats. Especially the first ones.
a holder of New York Post of 2022 suggested that millennials love their pets more than their siblings, their partners, and even more than their mothers. In the absence of being able to decide whether that sentence is true and applies at our borders, it does sound reasonable that at least they prefer to have pets rather than have children.
More dogs than children. And that we do not count the cats
The pandemic left us a change in trend: there are already more dogs than children in Spain. And that despite being generous in the definition of “child”. Adjusting for the number of people between zero and sixteen living in Spain, their downline, already well below eight million, has fallen short of the number of dogs, which is now over nine million.
It’s a surprise historical. In 2018 we were surprised that a city like San Francisco would have this situation, but in Spain we are already there, although it is true that the figures for San Francisco included people up to 18 years of age. Nor would it move the goal too much: counting on that same range, in Spain we would reach 8,622,915 children. There would still be more dogs.
And that we are not counting the cats.
The change in trend is surely one of the symptoms of the great social change that the decade of the tens has left, marked by the rise of the smartphone and perennial connectivity, but with other tentacles such as the drop in the birth rate and the certain replacement for it that pets have meant. Not even the increase in paternity leave has been able to change the inertia.
About the causes, starting with the increase in the cost of living above wage increases, or hyperinflation in housing and the tightening of access to mortgage credit, with the Euribor shooting up again to join the party, we can talk another day. And that for not opening more complicated melons. Without a house or children, but with dogs.
Pets require less attention and care than children, also less money (about 9% of the most common monthly income); but in return they are gaining presence and relevance not only at a family level, but also at a social level. The legal system has already changed to go from considering them “things” to “living beings endowed with sensitivity”, and they will even have their own ID.
The fewer and fewer children being born also exemplify other types of changes, such as the shift from compound names with a presence in the saints to names that are less biblical and, in some cases, that drink directly from social and media phenomena. José Ramón is not here, but Daenerys will be delighted to attend to him.
Featured image: Javier Lacort with MidJourney.