Life & Wisdom Quote by Elizabeth Jennings

She flinches at a single, cozy syllable because it smuggles in a whole worldview. "Pets" is nursery-soft, a word that pretends affection while quietly shrinking an animal into a role: a possession with a pulse. Jennings hears the diminuendo inside it. To call a cat or dog a "pet" is to turn a life into an accessory, something that exists to be stroked, displayed, managed. The phrase "no living of its own" lands like a moral accusation, not of cruelty in the obvious sense, but of a subtler theft: the theft of autonomy.

That sensitivity tracks with Jennings's broader poetic temperament, which often fixes on the ordinary (a room, a relationship, a habit) and exposes the pressure it exerts. Her intent isn't to scold pet-owners; it's to catch language in the act of domesticating reality. The subtext is feminist-adjacent without being slogan-y: naming can be a form of control, especially when it makes dependency sound like love. "Pets" is kin to other softening terms that turn uneven power into sentiment.

Context matters: Jennings wrote in a Britain where companion animals were increasingly folded into middle-class domestic identity, and where the rhetoric of "keeping" and "owning" sat comfortably beside genuine attachment. She doesn’t deny the attachment. She distrusts the vocabulary that congratulates us for it. The line works because it weaponizes a small aesthetic irritation into an ethical insight: tenderness can still be a cage, and language is often the lock.