Raising dogs vs children

I was thinking about this the other day -- the fundamental differences, in terms of philosophy and other things, between raising a good dog and raising children.

First of all, faith. You do not have a right to inflict faith on your children -- faith is a fundamentally adult series of choices, and never one that should be imposed before the age of reason. But with a dog, you must impart the simple religious message: "I have opposable thumbs, I can open the refrigerator, therefore I am God." Any sensible dog will accept this willingly and behave accordingly. You may be only one in a pantheon of Gods, but that's a detail.

Diet: it's wrong to make vegans or breatharians or something like that out of your kids, but you have a duty to feed your dog a well-designed diet, since a typical dog will eat whatever is available, until it's gone, to the detriment of waistline and eventually, joints. Leftovers are not a dog concept. So you need to decide what your dog will eat, when, to the extent you can. The dog will attempt to thwart you in this, but still, the duty is there.

Education and career: nothing is sadder than the parent who obsesses about the children's future to the extremes that we see these days. If you've decided already that little Ashley (age 6 months) is going to Harvard Law School, you're a nut basket. On the other hand, 6 months is a fine time to decide that Spot will probably not make much of a retriever, based on complete, head-cocked-to-one-side incomprehension when you throw a tennis ball. Consider a career in agility, or perhaps train him as a professional couch potato. Ball-focused dogs are a lot of work, anyway.