Furious over ‘fur’

This is a response to “Insure your fur?” (Jan. 14.) Cheryl Thomas obviously doesn’t know enough pet owners of the caliber that would pay for pet insurance. The majority of pet owners who care enough about their pets’ health to purchase an insurance plan are generally the same people you see opening their pockets widely for a lot of charitable causes. Empathy and caring for living things other than humans is not a bad trait. My husband and I are in the beginning steps of adopting. We are interested in an older child because so many kids are overlooked once they are not babies. When the case worker brought us the files on the first potential matches, you would have thought they were files from an animal shelter. Most of these children had been adopted between the ages of six months to five years old, and the adoptive families have since had their own biological children so they “need to find a home where the parents will be able to give the child the time and attention they deserve.” I have seen the exact same words used from people trying to find a home for their pet. Now, if we lived in a society that actually fostered the idea that each life we take responsibility for deserves a lifetime commitment of the best care we can provide, people would not be “re-homing” children like free kittens. We live in a society of disposable life – we dump our pets at the shelter and our elderly at nursing homes. If more people felt the empathy for their pets that led them to desire health insurance for them, might we see more compassion for our fellow humans as well? By Ms. Thomas’s reasoning it costs a lot more to hire nurses who come to my mom’s house 24/7 to care for my grandfather than if we placed him in a nursing home and with the money we saved we could sponsor a few of those starving kids in Africa. Because at the end of the day he doesn’t recognize us anyway due to the Alzheimer’s, so he wouldn’t even notice, right?