Responsability- Loni Thomas

In my cyber high class we were given a topic on responsibility. The question was ‘should children be given a pet to take care of?’ and honestly I think you should be a certain age in order to have a pet, I believe kids should wait until they’re at least thirteen in order to take care of a pet. The reason I believe this is because when you’re a certain age you don’t know what responsibility is, you can hardly take care of yourself, let alone another creature. I got my first pet when I was around nine. I had a grey and black tabby cat. Honestly, it was hard work and I really hard but I still didn’t understand my responsibility. Sure I fed the cat, gave it baths but I really had no idea of responsibility, and eventually I had got rid of the cat.
I remember begging my mom for a dog for about four years until I finally got exactly that. One day I had came home to find the smallest, most adorable dog ever. It was a male brown and white Shih Tzu. If you don’t know much about these they’re an ancient breed of dog that comes from royalty. They are very cute, have quite the personality, but they are very dominant and authority resistant, so it’s best to train them immediately or they will take over your house-literally- if I had known that maybe a lot of trouble I went through wouldn’t have happened.
But instead this happened; I treated my dog like a baby and let him get away with everything. He was a handful. It took him half a year to become house broken, he scratched up a lot of my belongings, and my families, but he was a sweet dog. He was so resistant to my rules because he knew I wouldn’t get too strict with him. But my step father soon stepped in after he realized I was incapable of training him.
Almost immediately after my step dad started training my dog he responded almost immediately. I had learned that I still wasn’t ready to have an animal but I was going to try and do the best that I could. Eventually, I had become a good pet owner. Although my dog never listened to me as well as he did with my stepdad he knew not to cross the line-most of the time. That was all I could hope for I guess and I was satisfied with that.
So I think that children should wait for an animal to teach a kid responsibility. Maybe giving them a daily job would be better until you think they are ready. It doesn’t mean they can’t ever have one just not at this time. That’s just my personal opinion after learning from my experiences from animals.