Well, here's one reason:

Pictures and sigs like this that make me laugh and say "awwwwww" at the same time! It's one thing to look at pictures of beautiful animals, but it's especially heart-warming and encouraging to look at pictures and know how much the animals are loved by their people. I have only one other friend I can bore with cat stories on a daily basis, so coming here to share them is so much fun. I can't tell you how many times I've laughed until I had tears in my eyes at some of the threads and pictures!

There will always be people on Pet Talk I disagree with, and I am guilty of starting or contributing to some of the arguments on here, but I'm learning as I go, and trying to follow Karen's advice -take deep breaths, count to 100 (well, 10,000 sometimes), and think before posting whether it will be relevant for everybody or just one or two people. (However, if there's animal mistreatment involved, I can be pretty hair-trigger.) My daughter is guilty of being one of the "teenagers" we're all carping about lately, but she still enjoys coming here and sharing pictures and stories of her ratties, and we know she's still as welcome as anyone. (I think some of those generalizations were made because nobody wanted to name names.) I agree that this is a clean, friendly, safe site for young people to visit, and a lot of fun. The "old-timers" don't want to keep PT all to themselves, because it would get pretty stale - heck, we were ALL new once! So newbies, post away, and if somebody doesn't like your posts, there's always that handy "ignore" feature they can use.