Does having a 'dog baby' make us happier than having a human baby?

While fertility rates across the world are falling, more and more of us are choosing to parent pooches

- DR CHRISTIAN JARRETT

I'll never forget the day my wife and I drove to pick up our miniature schnauzer puppy. She was just four weeks old and could sit in my palm. On the way home, I sat with her on the back seat as she cosied up to my lap, looking up at me with those big, adorable eyes.

In the weeks and months that followed, we used to joke that having a puppy felt like a dress rehearsal for having a baby.

These days, an increasing number of people seem to be thinking this way, identifying as 'dog parents' and seeing their furry friends as substitute children.

In a new paper in the European Psychologist, a pair of researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest - Laura Gillet and Prof Enikő Kubinyi – have drawn attention to this trend and raised the question of whether it's related to the parallel decline in human fertility rates worldwide.

As it happens, my wife and I ended up having human twins a few years after we got Ruby. But amid the ongoing cost-of-living crisis and a growing emphasis on individualistic values, could it be that many people are choosing to have dogs instead of raising children?

SUBSTITUTE CHILDREN

In the UK, fertility rates are at historic lows. In 2023, we were averaging 1.44 children per woman (the figure needs to be over 2 to sustain a population), with the number of live births at 591,072, the lowest annual figure since 1977. At the same time, however, dog ownership is on the rise, especially among younger generations.

There are over a million more pet dogs in the country today than there were a decade ago, and 45 per cent of owners are millennials (born between the early 1980s and mid 1990s). Anecdotally, we're increasingly treating dogs like people. At our local café you can order a 'puppuccino' and many owners are setting up their dogs' own social media accounts.