Science says your male pet is definitely breaking your stuff on purpose

As much as we love our pets, sometimes they can be total jerks. According to a new study, male pets are worse than female ones and tend to break more of your stuff — ON PURPOSE. Like, just because they’re bored. If this comes as a surprise to you, you’ve obviously never had a cat. SquareTrade (a company that also sells insurance) recently released a report called “Pets Break Stuff Damage Report” and found that pretty much everyone with a pet has a story about that pet breaking something. They looked at a lot of household electronics — like TVs, iPads, and laptops — but found that it’s smart phones pets are really after.

Just about 59 percent of their respondents said that a pet has destroyed a phone.

Hey, isn’t ruining our phones our job? What’s more, 63 percent of pets that broke something were male and 58 percent were middle aged. Confusing matters even worse, 55 percent of the little monsters were *actually* little and small in size.

When SquareTrade asked their survey respondents why their animal broke their stuff, 73 percent assumed that their pet was probably just bored. As if chewing your iPhone into pieces was their backup plan once they ran out of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to watch. The shame! Although, given that they can’t troll the internet for fail memes, can we really blame them?

It’s semi-amusing, until you tally up the fact that Americans have spent some $14 billion dollars replacing household items because a pet broke it.

Chewing was obviously the most common MO to destroy your stuff, but knocking some off of a counter, spilling liquid on something, and stepping on it were close behind. Yup, that sounds about right.

There’s actually not a whole lot research done about how cats and dogs perceive time, but it’s likely that they don’t have a real grasp on exactly how many hours they’ve been left alone, just sleeping in the sun. So when they “bored,” it’s not the same kind of bored that we experience. Which means if you swap out an actual phone for a chew toy or some other distraction, pets are just as likely to get at that than your brand new human toy.

So maybe it’s not really their fault. Plus, pets do so much more for us than just ruin things, so we can let them slide. But if you have a lot of precious cargo, maybe consider the gender of the next puppy or kitten you adopt. Always be prepared, right?