Pets - Worst Idea Ever?

Should your family get a pet? Heavens, no. Take it from two extremely reluctant pet owners of the cat, dog, and fish variety.  Okay, pets have upsides: their cute little faces. Their tolerating humiliating headdresses. But there are downsides as well, and in this episode we elaborate them for you in enough detail that you will vow never, ever to cave to your children’s demands for a pet.  Barring that, we hope you will at least consult our extremely useful Pet Matrix in order to balance your future pet’s fun-to-hassle ratio.    In this episode we discuss    why getting a pet will not, despite popular sentiment, make an animal lover out of you if you’re not one already  why you should or should not let your kids pick the pet’s name  how you, once you have a pet, will either travel less, travel differently, or have to find a relative with “pet bandwidth”  why you shouldn’t get a hamster cause you can’t handle a dog  why birds are an absolutely not    Here’s some useful links for further reading on the topic:  from Lifehacker: Where To Start When You’ve Decided You Want a Dog (first step: “Make sure you’re sure.”) from PetFinder: How Much a Dog Costs Per Year from The Orlando Sentinel: Study Says Cats Would Kill You If They Were Bigger Are you a doting pet owner? A absolutely not-er? A slowly-being-beaten-down-by-clamoring-children holdout? Tell us in the comments!   This episode is brought to you by PastBook. With PastBook, you can make gorgeous hardcover photo books of your Facebook or Instagram feeds in seriously one click. (And you know that’s where you put all your best photos already.) PastBook does the photo arranging and can also include the captions from your feed as part of each photo. To get started, go to pastbook.com/fresh.        Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices