Reddit mentions of The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Paradigm)

Your definition of parenting implies that to be a parent, you need to practice human parenting techniques. To me, if you respect the animal you adopt, you raise it through training, caring, loving, and being responsible for it, while it also has effects on you. This is parenting to me, and to separate it from pizza and what not, it is not a one way road, but rather a mutual relationship. My dog affects me as much as i affect it; I am not just the owner of a piece of property. I would not call myself a "parent" but I would call myself a "pet parent"; they are not equal, but I am the parent of the animal in the sense that I described above.

Basically, our entire back and forth was me saying "this is my definition of parenting" and you saying "this is my definition of parenting" and we weren't bridging the gap of what made those definitions different. I threw that link because you were generalizing that the definition has to start and end with humans, but while the specific word did not exist before humans and language, the idea of parenting existed before people and extends to more than just humans, in my opinion.

I don't think that we will ever agree on this, this whole concept took me a long time to really wrap my head around, but this book, along with some other articles and a university discussion made the dots start to connect for me, if by any chance you wanted to understand where I was coming from.