Is it normal to be totally intolerant of housepets-yet i like animals?

House pets totally suck. I completely agree with you. I am not militantly anti-house pet. I love animals outside and I support the ASPCA. But all the yuck - poop, hair, slobber. We were house sitting for friends and their dog licked my to say hello and then my eye itched so of course I was grossed out. That was a ramble, but I agree with you. And, that is BS that animals are clean. My friends are always fighting bug and hair and digestive issues that they contracted from the dogs.

The way you feel is perfectly normal. Animals do not belong inside. They should be kept outside. I don't like cats in the house either, but I absolutely cannot STAND a dog in the house and refuse to visit a house where people keep dogs inside. It's not just the hair and filthy dog slobbering and rubbing their asses all over the place either, houses with inside dogs STINK TO HIGH HEAVEN! I've never understood why people who live in the house with dogs claim their houses don't stink. I guess it's because they get used to the stink and can't smell it.

Every person is different. You just don't like animals as much as others.

hahaha thanks everyone, I know I am not in the popular group of thinking on this. I honestly don't know WHY it bugs me sooo much, I had cats as a child...and people always say cats are clean animals, but to me their SUPER dirty! They're never ever washed, yeah they lick themselves, but you lick yourself for a few weeks and see how clean you are? LOL. Thanks CraneyCrow for helping me think someone see JUST like I do!

Rats are very cute, yes. And are exceptionally clean in their habits. Cats too. If a cat's litter isn't changed often enough, the cat will find somewhere else to go. If an animal is that fussy about where it relieves itself, imagine how fussy it is with its own body.

Admittedly if you're keeping sugar gliders (which have no bowel control at all), your place is going to be filthy. But they kind of make up for it by being perhaps the cutest thing in the world (no small undertaking on a planet that contains Franka Potente and Ellen Page).

And, yes, animals moult. But so do you. Dust you find in your house or apartment is predominantly shed human skin cells. I personally don't make any distinction between what is shed from an animal and what is shed from a human - it all needs cleaning up, regardless of what caused it.

The question you should be asking yourself is why you do make a distinction. Is there some incident or implied behaviour which makes you think animals are dirty? Or, at least, any dirtier than humans.

As an aside, I'd be amazed if any species at all comes even close to humans for spreading unpleasantness. There's a plastic island of discarded packaging and bottles floating around the Pacific; an island of rubbish perhaps the same size as continental United States. There is spent nuclear fuel sitting in black glass in car parks and in concrete blocks at the bottom of our oceans. There are plague ships full of chemical and biohazardous waste that are refused entry to every world port. It's only a matter of time until one is stricken and breaks up at sea. Even the space around our planet is filled with such debris and detritus that some law firms have specialist departments for dealing with space damage claims. And then there are oil-slicks, landfill, rivers so polluted that no fish will ever swim in them again, mountains of white goods, and circuit boards, televisions and monitors, rusting cars, and rotting food. We endanger our very lives by eroding away the ozone layer. It is the fault and the ultimate responsibility of every human being.

I don't know about you, but I'd much sooner have some dog hairs on my carpet temporarily than a planet criss-crossed with toxic waste for at least the lifetime of every person alive today. We have created such a mess, we won't live long enough to clear it up.

If I was an animal and I heard a human being complaining about ME being a source of uncleanliness, I think I'd quite probably roll my eyes at the irony inherent in that statement.

At the very least.

There are a LOT of people who can't stand animals in the house, but most of those people have a life outside the internet. I have discovered there are an inordinate number of dog freaks and pet freaks, in general, online and it's because people who are obsessed with pets are such despicalbe human beings that no one wants to be around them so the internet is their only means of human contact.

Why did you let the friend move in with the cat in the first place? You should have a talk with your friend. Be honest about how you feel about the cat and tell the person that either the cat has to go, or they both have to go.

Humans crap in the house too. And you can't get sick from most of the germs that housepets carry, with a few exceptions. Contact with other humans will make you sicker than contact with pets.

Your house - your rules...

But humans are animals too: We shed dander and hair too, and we crap in white ceramic boxes.

I live on a farm with about 100 animals
None in the house, no dog or cat, it is nasty

Nothing wrong with disliking housepets. People have their boundaries and limitations and it is normal to want your space/home free of drool, stink, hair, poo, piss and disease. Dogs, for example, belong outside and that was their original purpose. It is normal to not want an animal roaming around your house begging for food, staring at your food while you eat, licking floors, barking incessantly, feeling entitled and intruding on your space. PEOPLE need to STOP giving housepets human characteristics, and STOP replacing human interaction with PETS. I do not hate animals, I respect them, and I respect that they can be dangerous and should be left in their own habitats which we have no business intruding upon. Another post I read said something about how WE bred dogs from wolves, jackels to serve us as protection, hunting and work on farms and that we've unnaturally bred them since them to be sniveling, needy, "domesticated" house pets that have replaced human interaction. This is where we went wrong people. This is why people bitch about housepets and all the problems housepets cause indoors, BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T MEANT TO BE INDOORS IN THE FIRST PLACE! We have laws to protect humans against harmful clinical and scientific experimentation, yet we continue to breed and 'domesticate' these creatures into housepets and it strikes me that this similar 'experimentation' with housepets simply goes against the laws of nature. Additionally, if we stopped breeding that which was not meant to be bred for our 'sick twisted pleasure' you wouldn't have so many abandoned dogs in the streets, parks, shelters. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Perhaps when the CDC issues a warning about a virus pandemic caused my dogs and their waste will people finally realize they have walking diseases/demons in their houses that have already taken over. Can you say Planet of the Dogs?

The people who can't afford pets are always the best.

/agree with dappled. I read this and just kind of laughed at the total disgust the poster has with 'pets', as I frequently feel said disgust towards humans for the aforementioned reasons.

Not only do we shed, track "germs" and leave dead skin wherever we go like other animals...we develop lots of synthetic materials that are do not decompose for a ridiculous amount of time, use things made of them once and throw them into a pile...hooray!

Wow Dappled, well said... totally agree.

Dappled has said it all for me!!!