In the last few years, pet owners have taken to social media on Mother’s Day, posting pictures of their pets – lovingly called “fur babies” – to celebrate the bond they share.

Honoring your pets as part of the family is great, but don’t call yourself a mother.

Raising cats and dogs can be a real pain. The amount of furniture chewed, peed on and scratched to smithereens would drive anyone crazy. But the difficulties associated with training your puppy or kitten doesn’t stack up to the emotional and monetary cost associated with raising human children.

Let’s start with bonding. When we come in contact with our loved ones, whether they be humans or pets, the hormone oxytocin is released. This hormone, dubbed “the love hormone,” is how humans form bonds with their family units, including pets.

However, oxytocin is much more prominent in the bond shared by a mother and her newborn. According to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, the hormone plays a role in a labor delivery by being released into the bloodstream as the cervix and uterus stretch; again, as mother and baby experience skin-to-skin contact; and, finally, as a major player in lactation and breastfeeding.

I hate to break it to you, but that kind of bond just is not possible with your pets.

Next we have commitment. When you pick up your pet from the humane society or breeder, you have made a 10 – 20 year commitment to care for that pet, depending on the breed.

When you bring a child into your life, you make a lifelong commitment. If all goes well, you’ll die long before your child, and you better hope you prepared them to live without you.

Pets don’t get that choice. In fact, they’re making a commitment to you more than you are to them; they can never live without you, their human. They may end up with a new human for various reasons, but they need a human.

So while you can raise your dog or cat to be as ornery or well-mannered as you like, that flexibility doesn’t exist with children. If you fail at rearing your child, the amount of physical and emotional pain the child feels, let alone those around them, is unlike anything a pet could experience.

The bad habit kitty has of knocking over expensive décor cannot compare to human bad habits like addiction and abuse.

When parents fail, we get people like Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh and Hitler. The worst a badly-trained pet can do is maul another person or animal, which, horrific in itself, is not on the same level of cruelty and evil humans can descend to.

That’s why we celebrate Mother’s Day – to commend the mothers or mother-figures in our lives who have helped to shape us into the reasonably well-functioning humans we are today.

As for those who cannot conceive or have decided not to have children, the bonds you have with your pets still matter.

Even if you have children, your pets are still family. The bonds formed between a human and their pet deserve to be commemorated. But be honest, having a pet does not call for the same sacrifice that being a mother does.

So, instead of infiltrating Mother’s Day with pictures about your fur babies, try celebrating National Pet Day on April 11. According to the holiday’s website, it was founded in 2005 by Animal Welfare Advocate Colleen Paige to promote love and compassion for all animals.

The bonds we share, whether they be with two-legged or four-legged family members, are important to honor, but let’s keep mother’s day for mothers.

Alysen Boston is a senior communication major from Baltimore, Maryland. She can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of The Office of Student Media.