i think my parents are mistreating their animals

i feel like my parents are mistreating our pets, AIW??

hello everybody from reddit usually i don’t come on here with sensitive subjects like this i come on here to lurk and occasionally post on smoking themed subreddits but im 19 years old and i need help.

I know my parents are mistreating our pets and i dont know what to do or how to help, we have a cat named bullet he is 23, we have had since before i was born and he has always been a very aggressive cat since before i can remember my parents say he has always been that way but i dont think any cat is just like that for no reason (they got him declawed about 20 or so years ago), with that being said from what i know and what i gathered from just researching about animals and seeing the way my parents treat bullet all the other animals that aren’t mine, i think its abusive.

i’ve only seen them hit him a couple times (i dont think they should at all) but they blow smoke directly in his face a lot. i have seen it multiple times with my own eyes. i have been seeing this since i was a kid but i never said anything.

when i was about 9-10 i wanted a dog so bad, because we didnt have any other pets but my mom has OCD she is a MAJOR clean freak like constantly mopping, vacuuming, cleaning. CONSTANTLY and so i didn’t understand really at that time getting a dog in an environment where she can’t have any mess, our dog is probably gonna be constantly locked up. despite what my mom was saying, we got a golden lab and and she was locked up most of the time. unless me and my brother were playing with her outside or we were watching her in our room, shes always in a cage. she’s fed in the cage, drinks in the cage usually from what i remember and if not, probably fed outside.

i just feel like ever since we have had animals they have never treated them like.. right.. like they don’t seem like they even really want to be pet owners half the time?? like and then my older brother, who doesn’t even live with us, got a dog (a golden retriever) and he was moving houses from his other house and he needed us to keep his dog for a while, which was still a very little puppy at the time.. and he has now been with us ever since. he told us he could no longer keep the dog due to his situation and now we have 2 dogs that my mom never really even wanted. which then causes my mom to feel like she constantly has to clean if they are even out to be let outside briefly, because hair flies everywhere. why wouldn’t my brother or my parents just find a new home for that dog knowing she couldn’t handle the hair from one dog in the first place, and obviously i didn’t say anything at the time because i wasn’t really thinking about this stuff, i was probably around 14 15 around this time. im finally understanding more that they don’t really treat our animals right.

our dogs are constantly barking because they are locked up all the time, besides when they are using the bathroom outback or just running around out there, and my dad just yells at them to shut up so they just sit there in their cages and whine and whine. like clearly your dogs have energy they need to let out.

i would try to explain to them that the dogs probably just want to run around and play but my mom doesn’t want that because it would cause too much hair to go everywhere. no matter what. we play on carpet and it’s still way too much hair. i don’t remember this happening many times because at some point i just stopped trying to play with my dogs since it seemed to cause such a big problem. but eventually i stopped listening to my parents when they would tell me what to do when it came to our dogs because i just didn’t think it was right that the dogs were locked up most of the time, and when they were free to run around the house they had to lay right in front of my parents or else they would be getting yelled at to lay down or get in the cage.

they just sit there and smoke and bullet is usually laying right there next to them or on top of them and the dogs are just right there, and when i am out there making food or just doing whatever with my girlfriend, we have both seen them blow smoke in their faces. recently i have seen it more commonly, i don’t know if it’s just because i’m realizing it more now, i never really used to spend time in the living room.

recently me and my girlfriend adopted a kitten and we brought it home off the streets to my house, the sweetest little kitty ever. obviously i asked my parents if we could take home the kitty before hand and they agreed. i am very protective of my kitty. like he is my son. and i make this very clear, about 2-3 months ago i saw my parents blow smoke in my kittens face. i got really upset. i told them you can do that to your own animals if you think thats okay but NEVER do it to my kitten and they pretty much just laughed at me . i dont know what else to do.

today was a breaking point. i went out of my bedroom to grab a snack and walked out to my mother crying in our living room because our elderly cat bullet was laying there dead. eyes looked like they were rolling back he was literally unresponsive . not even 2-3 hours before that i had saw her blow smoke directly on him laying in the exact same spot. i literally lost it i went to my room and cried in my girlfriends arms just to hear my mom yell that he was just sleeping really hard.

i have been trying to tell them they need to put down our older cat, he like yells when he goes to the bathroom, he can’t even really jump on top of things but he still does which causes him to get stuck on top of our counters and such. he won’t let you pet him and if he does it isn’t for longer than a few seconds hes like always so angry and seems so unhappy.

i brought up the fact i saw her blow smoke at him hours prior, after the fact we realized he was alive and i recommended having him put down considering all of his issues and how he’s always just been so aggressive and unhappy but my parents say it’s how he’s always just been. no cat is always just like that. he was declawed but i don’t even think declawed cats act super aggressive but honestly i don’t really have any idea (correct me if im wrong). my dad got all offended because i guess to him it seemed like i was saying hes not a very good pet owner(i was really trying to say that in a nice way) and he said “then i guess we should call the police because you are smoking weed and you aren’t 21 since you want to be a hypocrite”something along those lines.. first off.. im in legal state where as long as your property owners are cool with it and you are on their property and you are 18 it’s all good 👍 (they are the property owners and they smoke and are okay with it) and why would he think that animal abuse and smoking weed “underage” are in the same category at all?

at this point im really just at a loss of options and i want to hear what others say or some ideas of what should i do?? i dont want to like call the police on my parents or anything i want them to understand that they are clearly in the wrong doing things like this. i literally told them we could call the police and ask them what they think but my dad told us to leave so i got all my things and left. sorry for any grammar mistake, wrote this out pretty quickly. AIO? ask me anything i’ll try to respond thank you.