Counterpoint: I don't think you deserve maternity leave for owning a cat

“No please god no” -The Cat

Bringing my adopted cat, Jameson, home with me in 2014 was one of the happiest days of my life.

Having to go back to work two days later was one of the worst.

While the rest of the country is hung up on the necessity of maternity leave — or even the newly coined “meternity” — one group continues to be overlooked when it comes to paid time off from work: new pet owners.

Bad day to be a HR manager. You already deal with more than enough weird requests from cat-owning employees as is; and now thanks to this article, you’ve got a line out the door of your most nuerotic workers wondering why they can’t get maternity leave for choosing to adopt the worlds worst pet.

Couple facts about cats- they would actually prefer it if you weren’t home, so the author of this take is basically asking for a week off work to abuse a animal. When you go to a cat owners house the first thing you hear is “close the door so the cat won’t escape” which is the behavior of a prisoner, not a loyal companion. You could probably convince me to give PTO to a employee who owned a real pet like a dog or any other cool animal that eats cats, but having a cat is not even a real commitment. Its a hobby for people who like to tinker around with can openers and keep sandboxes of feces and urine in their laundry room.

In the spirit of hearing both sides, I will allow the author to defend herself:

“Paw-ternity” leave is already a reality in the UK — the US pet-insurance provider Petplan found that nearly 5 percent of new pet owners in the UK were offered time off to care for their four-legged kids.

1. The British also drink boiling hot beer and eat fish out of a newspaper so they’re not exactly a society filled with roll models

2. You could find 5% of employers in Glasgow who offer PTO to employees under arrest for stabbing someone at a dog track

This also begins the authors obsession with referring to her cat as a child, which as I’m sure her boyfriends and psychitrists have explained to her many times, is not the case. She continues:

According to Psychology Today, pet owners have better self-esteem, fitness, sociability and happiness than non-pet owners. They also have lower blood pressure and cholesterol.

Having kids doesn’t improve an employee’s health — which would make them better workers — yet we grant them six weeks off to care for a newborn.

Finally she starts to make some since. Great point that we coddle our nations mothers and fathers by giving them PTO to look after a object that is nothing but a glorfied sex trophy. Every now and again you get lucky and you get a kid that grows up to cure cancer or score a bunch  of touchdowns, but for the most part all these kids do is suck time away from employees and grow up to be workers who have time-sucking kids of their own. They provide absolutley no health benefits, and in fact your statistically twice as likely to get killed by someone’s child than you are to have your life saved by one. Children are probably the most overrated thing in America besides cats, and you shouldn’t get paid time off work to look after either of them.