Does pet ownership actually improve your health?

If you enter the home of a typical American, you’ll probably spot a dog or a cat, maybe a hamster or a goldfish. About 70 million human households are home to pets too.

Most people think that pets make us happier and healthier. But one dog lover and animal researcher is challenging that conventional wisdom.

Pets are considered great companions. That’s the number one reason we give for owning pets.

“Animals are non-judgmental, they give unconventional love. They greet you when you come home at the end of the day. They’re just very comforting,” said Rhonda Manville, with the Seattle Humane Society.

She says adoptive pet owners write her letters all the time. “People say ‘I am benefiting so much from having my cat. My cat is my best buddy.'”

But do pet owners get health benefits too? Manville says, “Yes.”

“At the beginning of the year, we got a letter from a couple who adopted a 5-year-old Beagle-mix from us and since adopting that dog, they had lost 80 pounds, as a couple, because they’re out walking their dog,” said Manville.

She cites studies that show pet ownership actually improves chronic conditions. “Research shows that people with pets tend to have lower cholesterol and blood pressure.”

Hal Herzog is skeptical. He has been studying human-animal interactions for 25 years. He calls it anthrozoology.

“For every study that’s found that pets, for example, lower stress levels or blood pressure, there’s a study that either found no difference or that pet owners are worse off,” claims Herzog.

Herzog thinks you could argue a health downside to pet ownership. “There’s been a number of epidemiological studies that found that pet owners have higher rates of things like depression, anxiety, panic attack, chronic tiredness, migraine headaches and then there’s things like injuries from falls; 85,000 people a year are taken to hospital emergency rooms because they trip over their pets.”

Herzog is an admitted dog person and a pet owner, but he’s taking a scientific approach to the debate about pet ownership.

“What we have is a mishmash of results and I think that people have come to just accept this idea that pets are good for people, they make your life better, they make you healthier, you get more exercise, etc. etc. and I don’t think that’s a fact yet.” Herzog calls it a hypothesis.

Professor Herzog cites a “symptoms survey” a woman did of fellow chronic fatigue syndrome patients who overwhelmingly told her they felt pets improved their lives. “But then when she actually looked at how they responded on these symptom checklists, there wasn’t any difference at all between the two groups. The pet owners were just as lonely, just as tired, just as depressed as the people without the pets, so I think we need more information.”

The National Institutes of Health has teamed with the MARS Corporation to fund a multi-million dollar survey to review the impact of pets on people. We might have more definitive results in four to five years.