Santa Cruz del Islote, the island located in the department of Bolívar, holds the title of being the most densely populated place in Colombia. Closely behind is any shopping center in the Aburrá Valley on a Saturday afternoon.
The lack of public space in the city causes rivers of people to converge every weekend towards the shopping centers that swarm throughout the city. Within them, there is nowhere left to walk. The noise makes them unlivable. However, beyond the unpleasant experience, I have noticed a trend that intensifies over time every time I unfortunately find myself having to visit a shopping center: the presence of dogs everywhere.
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t make the observation with resentment. I love dogs, as mine could attest: Roger Federer González, a Golden Retriever whose photos take up half of the memory on my phone.
Even so, the packs you see in shopping centers today seem strange to me. I have few memories from my childhood in which dogs were allowed to be brought to these places. A few years ago, when dogs started strolling through the halls, they were an unusual and easily identifiable sight, with half the people in the room running out to pet them. But now, not even: their quantity is such that it is impossible to pay attention to them. It seems like there are more dogs than children in the place. Barking takes over the environment, almost always in closed spaces, with owners running after their dogs with plastic bags preventing a disaster from occurring.
Shopping malls are far from the only place where this has been normalized. Now the strange thing is that a restaurant is not pet-friendly. Dog groomers are already more sophisticated and expensive than those for humans. In any ice cream shop there are products for them. They make them cakes, they celebrate their birthdays. Something not surprising, given that today 7 out of 10 people consider their pets an essential part of their family unit. And it is not an exclusive case of Colombia: the majority of the West has followed the same trend. In the United States, for example, about 70% percent of families have at least one pet, a figure similar to what DANE reports for our country. Pets are gaining more and more weight in our lives, at the same time that, silently and progressively, Colombia enters what will sooner rather than later be a demographic crisis due to the lack of births.
Despite still being a middle-income country, everything seems to indicate that we have already exhausted our demographic dividend. Births for 2023 are projected to be around 500,000, 30% of what they were 15 years ago. Not only do we have a fertility rate below the replacement rate, but we are close to or even below the birth rates of “developed” countries such as France, the United States or Australia, and few things will be more relevant for the future. of our country than this reality.
2023-10-08 09:26:20
#dogs #children
