“[Would I Be The Jerk] For Not Going On A Family Vacation Because My Brother Wants To Bring His Dog”

Family vacations when you are a child are fun because you can travel a bit, have a change of scenery and a new experience, but it’s not as relaxing when you grow up, because you have standards, preferences and expectations.

This man’s ideal vacation doesn’t involve dogs, but his brother is insisting on bringing his pet. He doesn’t like dogs and is afraid for his 18-month-old son and could just not go, but then the trip probably would happen altogether.

More info: Reddit

Image credit: vrbo (not the actual image)

About every other year, the Original Poster’s (OP) family, which includes him, his brother, his sister and his parents, would go on a trip, but it so happened that the last one they went on was in 2018, so they decided it’s time to plan something.

His parents booked a VRBO on a beach in Florida, but it seems that the plans are not set in stone. The OP found out that his brother would be taking his dog with him. It's “some sort of terrier” so it must not be a big dog, and is well-behaved, but overly friendly. In the comments the man explained that he meant it would invade his privacy.

The OP doesn’t like dogs and doesn’t want to be living with one in the same house. He also has an 18-month-old son he would be taking on the trip and he was not sure how the dog would behave around a baby. Another issue he had was that he didn’t want to plan his family activities around a dog, as they are not allowed everywhere.

That is why the man talked about it with his brother asking to not take it. Bored Panda contacted psychologist Ryan Howes and he explained to us that there is nothing inherently wrong with asking to not take a dog on a vacation, but the person asking has to be prepared to hear no and to be perceived as a jerk because sometimes in families "we don’t ask for what we want and just go with the flow to keep the peace."

A negative answer was exactly what the OP received as the brother claimed that he couldn’t leave his dog. Also, in the dog owner's opinion, a baby would cause more inconvenience than a dog, to which a lot of people in the comments agreed.

Ryan Howes couldn't tell you if it's true, but in his opinion, "the biggest inconvenience in this story is between the brothers. I’m glad the parents stepped back and told them to sort it out, but they’re not. They’re both stubbornly holding on to their viewpoints and I’m not seeing any negotiation or compromise. As they say in my field - you can be right or you can be in relationship. They’re both trying to be right, and OP is looking for Reddit to be the jury. Their relationship isn’t going very far with this approach."

The comments were actually quite interesting as people had lots of different opinions. Overall, the OP was deemed to be the jerk in the situation and redditors’ arguments are that the dog is well-behaved, so it wouldn’t be a problem to keep it away from the baby.

But there were people who said that the OP is not being a jerk and if he doesn’t want to be around a dog on his vacation, he has a full right to not go. And then there were readers who didn’t see any jerks at all, but they pointed out that the OP and his brother are at different stages of life now and are just not compatible to be vacationing together, which is fine and neither of them is more right than the other.

Psychologist Ryan Howes gave a suggestion of what could be possibly happening here, "There are a lot of unknowns for this vacation, and OP isn’t sure what a family vacation will look like with additions to the standard configuration. So he’s thinking of bailing. He may want to ease his anxieties with a backup plan - go to the VRBO as planned and if it doesn’t work after giving it a try for a day or two, move to a nearby hotel and meet the family for meals. Right now he’s making assumptions about how bad it could be without any data. Try it first, and if it isn’t working, then you have your data and can pivot to plan B."

While there are a lot of unknowns for the OP about the vacation, we also don't know everything about the situation. We don’t know the reason why the OP’s brother is taking his dog with him when he knows it will bother the rest of the family. Maybe he doesn’t have friends who have the means to take care of it temporarily, maybe he doesn’t have money to pay for a dog hotel or he is feeling anxious about leaving it in the care of someone else because as the OP said, it seems that he does everything with his dog.

Also, such problems arise from more complicated circumstances, "Would you feel different if you found out that OP was attacked by a dog as a child? Or if his baby had been attacked? What if his younger brother bullied him throughout his childhood? There’s always more to the story. It’s often fun to chime in on little dramas like this, but you might not want to be too sure of your answer. "

But what we know is that the OP’s brother loves his dog. He is 27 and it's no surprise that he values his dog so much because surveys show that Millennials and Gen Z love pets like they would children, or pets are as close as they can come to children because their financial situation can only afford animals.

According to WFLA, “For adults born between 1981 and 1996, the millennials, 22% of those with pets chose to delay having a child or won’t at all, due to the lower total cost of caring for their babies, furry or otherwise. From Gen Z, the younger generation or those born between 1997 to 2012, almost a quarter of respondents, 23%, said they’d wait to have children or would not, due to the costs.”

The Wildest describes the “furbaby” as a stress-free surrogate for kids, because “you can leave a pet alone. It’s easier to find daycare for them. They can be expensive, but are far less likely to rival the financial burden that children — and later, teens — create. You don’t have to uproot your social, romantic, or professional lives nearly as much to accommodate a pet.”

But they still give you that sense of caring for someone and receiving love as well as companionship. Dr Min Yeo says that pet owners' brains respond to their dogs the same as parents’ brains respond to their babies and one look is all it takes: “Just by gazing at each other, humans and dogs experience  a surge of the love hormone oxytocin, which is similar to how parents feel when they look at their baby.”

When comparing how important dogs are to their owners, 81 percent of survey respondents said that their pets are as equally important as children in the family and 78 percent of women with dogs refer to themselves as dog moms and not owners.

But some people would say that this is crossing the line and animals will never be equal to humans. M.A. Wallace, who has two children herself, wrote for The Cut, “We love them because they aren’t human, then spend their lives treating them like people. We project onto them what we wish we could see in ourselves and others. We don’t really want them to be animals — wild, free, ultimately unknowable — we want them to be like us.”

It's not wrong to feel a connection with an animal, but Ryan Howes sees it as a symptom of a bigger problem, "It’s concerning because I see people becoming more and more isolated and disconnected from friends, loved ones and communities where they could find purpose and support. I’m not terribly concerned about the reliance on pets for connection and companionship, I just see that as filling a need while we try to address the more serious issue of interpersonal disconnection."

The psychologist draws our attention to the facts that a report by Making Caring Common shows that "36% of all Americans—including 61% of young adults and 51% of mothers with young children—feel 'serious loneliness.'" Not only that, but the Survey Center on American Life suggests that people are making fewer friends as well as talking to the ones they have less. As Ryan Howes observes, "this combination of factors is greatly contributing to an uptick in our reliance on pets to meet our relational needs."

Are you on the side where animals can be compared to children when it comes to emotional attachment or do you feel that people often forget that pets are just domesticated animals? Also, do you think the OP is being unreasonable for not wanting a dog on family vacation? How would you resolve the situation? Let us know in the comments.