by David Levy
In two studies based on students’ perceptions of the cognitive abilities of animals, Jeffrey Rasmussen and Donald Rajecki found that although the students appreciated that the cognitive abilities of dogs and humans are at different levels, they believed that the mental processes giving rise to these abilities are broadly similar, that dogs think like we do, just not so well. Pets normally live in the home and are therefore in regular or even constant proximity to their owners and to members of the same household. For this reason, pets are themselves members of the household, even if they are not always treated as part of the family, and in most households pets are perceived as individuals with their own life histories, their own personalities, and their own “personal” tastes. This individuality is a major factor in explaining why most pets are regarded as members of the family.
Not everyone understands the appeal of pets and the strength of the bond that is often developed by a pet owner for an animal. Some of my friends and acquaintances kid me about my devotion to my cats, in a few cases going so far as to suggest that I’m crazy. But such a love is not a phenomenon that deserves to be pilloried. As James Serpell has argued, attachment to a pet is too widespread a phenomenon throughout history and in the modern world for it to be viewed as an abnormal response by inadequate individuals.
Research into the anthropomorphism of animals has revealed that not only are pet owners more likely than nonowners to attribute humanlike understanding to their own pets, they are also more likely than nonowners to make the same attribution to animals in general. For one study, Margaret Fidler, Paul Light, and Alan Costall showed students a series of videotaped sequences of dogs in everyday settings and then questioned the students about the dogs’ behavior. The common factor in the taped sequences was that the dog and its owner were interacting in some way: The owner was stroking the dog, eating with the dog at her feet, teasing the dog while talking to it, and leaving the room while the dog was watching her. The students’ descriptions of the events shown in the videotapes were then classified in one of three ways: as anthropomorphic (for example, “The dog watched the person eating and moved to a position to get eye contact and sat and tried without break to get the person’s attention”), or using “as if” terminology (e.g., “The dog appears to get excited…. He turns around as if he is looking for what the owner is talking about”), or mechanistic—descriptions devoid of any mention of meaning or purpose on the part of the dog. Those students who were or had been pet owners were found to be significantly more likely than nonowners to respond that the dogs’ actions were deliberate and that their behavior resulted from their understanding of the situations portrayed in the video.
Some pet owners subconsciously take the process of anthropomorphism even further and describe feelings toward animals that indicate they value these relationships more than human ones. In modern Western societies, human relationships often produce difficulties and dissatisfaction, providing one reason that this may be so. Surveys of veterinary practitioners in the United States indicate that some pet owners would rather lose their spouse than their pet. Further evidence of the preference for a pet relationship over a human one comes from a 1990 survey for which Peter Peretti interviewed 128 senior citizens in a Chicago park and found that they devoted considerably more time to describing dogs as friends than to describing people as friends. In fact, 75 percent of the men and 67 percent of the women in Peretti’s survey said that their dogs were their only friends. And in a study by Sandra Barker and Randolph Barker, it was found that on average the owners felt significantly closer to their dogs than they did to other (human) members of their family.
More recent research supports these findings. In one sample quoted by Archer, taken from a questionnaire study of dog owners, more than half of those surveyed agreed that the loss of their dog would mean as much to them as the loss of a family member or friend. Some owners also made favorable comparisons with human relationships, typical of which were these: “I care for them more than for most people I know,” and “[When I was] a child the dog was the only member of the family who could make life worth living.” In other remarks, dog owners elaborated just what it was about the relationships with their dogs that made them preferable to human beings: always being there, always loving, and comparatively uncritical. In other words, the relationship with the animal—because it is based largely on the positive features perceived by the owners—manages to avoid those conditional and judgmental features that are so inconvenient in human relationships.
Archer also found “convincing evidence that people usually view their relationship with pets as similar to those they have with children”—for example, playing with their pets, talking to them in baby talk,* and cuddling them. Language directed toward babies and young children shows a number of specific characteristics that marks it out from the language used with adults. Such language is referred to as “motherese” and consists of a number of features, such as short utterances, with many imperatives and questions, repetitions, simple sentences, and tag questions (those ending with “aren’t you?”). Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek and Rebecca Treiman examined recordings of dog owners talking to their dogs for such features in their speech, comparing the type of language spoken to the dog to that used in conversation with human babies. They found that nearly all the characteristics of motherese were present in these one-sided conversations with pet dogs, suggesting that a pattern of language used to aid interactions with young children has readily been co-opted for interacting with other social beings who are, like infants, presumed to be at a lower level of understanding than adult humans.†
The use of motherese is just one of the indications that the interactions people have with pets are modifications of those they have with other humans. Dogs and cats are mammals, like us, whose emotions and moods are similar to ours, although the ways they express them are different. Oskar Heinroth, one of the pioneers of the ethological tradition,‡ described animals as “emotional people of extremely poor intelligence,” a view shared by Archer: “He is right to the extent that it is the emotional similarity that people recognize in animals. This forms the basis of being able to communicate with them by visual and auditory signals, and by touch…and by sharing object play with them.”
The Strength of Human Love for Pets
From time to time, reports appear in newspapers confirming the strength of devotion that some people bestow upon their pets. At a July 2005 wedding in Wanganui, New Zealand, the groom, Glen Armitage, designated his dog as best man, by no means the first reported case of a dog in this role.* There have been cases reported of people going one stage further and “marrying” their pet,† and there is now a Web site to make that process quicker and easier, as well as lucrative for the site owner. If you log on to www.marryyourpet.com, you will be able to choose between a “Simple Wedding” at only ten dollars, for which you can “marry your pet online and receive an official certificate of your happy day,” in addition to which “all married couples can have their picture on the Marry Your Pet Happy Couples page,”‡ or a “Big Wedding” at eighty-five dollars, which brings the extra bonus of “an ‘I married my pet’ T-shirt so you can show the whole world just how much you cherish your pet.”§ Or you could shell out two hundred dollars for the “Biggest Wedding,” which gets you not only an online marriage, T-shirt, and certificate but also a “hand embroidered, personalized wall plaque to always remind you of your special day.”
The marryyourpet.com site carries a disclaimer advising, inter alia, that “by marrying your pet he/she may be entitled to half your house and all your income,” so you have been warned! But despite this warning, it is clear that a “marriage” to a pet has no legal significance or recognition. And it is not because of the desire for any form of legal recognition that some owners choose to make this gesture; rather it is because they feel so much love for their pet that they want to affirm their commitment in a public way.
A more common example of a demonstration of love for a pet is s
een when an owner offers a reward for finding a missing animal (and from time to time petnappers extract a ransom from a pet’s loving owner). Another example is the far-from-rare occurrence of a deceased person’s having bequeathed a substantial legacy to be used for the benefit of a pet, occasionally making the animal a millionaire. And sometimes in divorce cases a battle breaks out for the custody of a pet, a battle often conducted with a vehemence that other divorcing couples reserve for custody disputes over their children.
An even more widespread indication of the strength of people’s attachment to their pets can be observed from the nature of pet owners’ reactions to the loss of their animal, with the average length of the owner’s bereavement following the death of a pet being some six to eight weeks. When a pet dies, the owner’s feelings of grief are often very similar to those experienced due to the loss of a spouse or partner, a phenomenon first noted by researchers in the 1970s and 1980s. More recent studies by Elaine Drake-Hurst and Marilyn Gerwolls have also demonstrated parallels between the feelings of grief that follow the death of a human loved one and the grief prompted by the death of a pet, as has John Archer, who reported that a substantial number of pet owners surveyed in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Israel, were willing to admit that the death of a pet would make them cry.
While it seems clear from all this research that the nature of pet owners’ grief is broadly similar to the grief suffered through the loss of a human loved one, it is less clear what levels of stress and depression are evoked by the grief from pet loss. Some studies have found these levels to be considerably lower than when a person is suffering the loss of a human loved one, while other research suggests that the levels of the grief are just as intense as those found after a human death. In yet another study, Mary Stewart investigated the effects of grief on pet owners due to the loss of their animal and found that as many as 18 percent of her survey group “were so disturbed that they were unable to carry on with their normal routine,” and one-third of her subjects, although not quite so badly affected, nevertheless described themselves as “very distressed.”
For many owners the only relationship in which they feel accepted and important is the one with their pet, and when that pet dies, much more is lost than the animal. The companionship, security, comfort, acceptance, love, and feelings of being needed and important—all are taken away with the pet’s death, creating vacuums that explain why the death of a beloved pet can represent a profound loss. The closeness of owners’ feelings for their pets was investigated by Sandra Barker and Randolph Barker, who found that dog owners generally felt as close to their pets as to the closest member of their family, and in one-third of cases the dog owners felt closer than to any human family member.
Another aspect of love for pets was investigated in an observational study conducted by Stephen Smith, which showed that women have stronger feelings of attachment to their (nonhuman) pets than do men, one of the reasons why I believe that many women will develop loving relationships with humanoid robots in the decades to come.
Some Benefits of Owning Pets
The study of human-animal relationships is a relatively new field of psychological research that started attracting strong interest during the 1980s. A number of studies have indicated that it is not only emotional comfort and satisfaction that we can derive from our relationships with our pets but also therapeutic benefits, including improvements in people’s health, happiness, and general well-being.* These effects result mostly from the lowering of the blood pressure and from the relaxation response in humans caused by stroking and other forms of interaction with their cats and dogs.*
The emotional well-being brought on by pets can manifest itself in several different therapeutic forms. A pet can be a constant source of companionship, by providing love and by acting as a surrogate friend. And in the case of dogs, they can also act as parent substitutes, a role created as a result of the emotional security a dog brings to a household, performing a task that helps to relieve stress.
Emotional and Sociological Benefits of Pet Ownership
Alicia Stribling has found that the more contact people have with their pets, the happier they are.† One physiological reason for this is described by Johannes Odendaal and is related to six neurochemicals in the brain that help to reduce blood pressure. Odendaal found that when the dog owners in his experiment interacted with their pets, there was an increase in the production of these chemicals in the brain, including dopamine, phenethylamine, and endorphins, which are related to feelings of happiness and well-being, and at the same time there was a reduction of all the stress hormones, like cortisol.
Karen Allen has compared the relative benefits of having the social support of a friend or spouse with the therapeutic effects of a pet and found that a dog provides more effective social support for reducing stress than does a spouse! Two hundred forty married couples, of whom half were pet owners, were asked to perform two tasks known to induce stress: solving some problems in mental arithmetic and plunging a hand into ice water for two minutes. These experiments were carried out several times by the partners in each couple in various combinations: alone, with a pet or a friend, with their spouse, and with both their spouse and their pet or friend. Allen discovered that the pet owners exhibited much lower baseline heart rates and blood-pressure levels than did nonowners, commenting that “while the idea of a pet as social support may appear to some as a peculiar notion, our participants’ responses to stress, combined with their descriptions of the meaning of pets in their lives, suggest to us that social support can indeed cross species.” And as for the social-support value of the spouses, Allen found that participants made the most errors in the mental-arithmetic problems when their spouses were present but their pets were absent. As a result she speculates that one reason pets appear to elicit such calm responses is that they encourage the positive-feeling states that social-support theorists have suggested may enhance a person’s ability to handle stress. Furthermore, talking to dogs, in contrast to talking to one’s spouse, has been found to be related to greater life satisfaction, greater marital satisfaction, and better physical and mental health.
Physical Health Benefits of Pet Ownership
One of the first researchers to recognize the physical-health benefits of pets was James Serpell, who investigated the therapeutic effects of giving non–pet owners a cat or a dog for periods ranging from six to ten months. He found that not only did the subjects’ self-esteem improve while the animals were with them but their physical health did as well. This phenomenon had been suspected by Judith Siegel, who carried out a quantitative study on a sample of 938 patients enrolled in Medicare, finding that older people who own pets become less stressed by major adverse events in their lives and make fewer visits to the doctor than do non–pet owners.
Several other studies within various branches of medicine and care have similarly documented clear therapeutic benefits from pet ownership. Perhaps the most dramatic effect is that noted by Erika Friedmann and Sue Thomas, who found that heart patients who own pets are more likely to survive the year following a heart attack than are those who do not. Of 87 dog owners in Friedmann’s study, only 1 died within a year of having a heart attack (1.1 percent) while of the 282 who did not own dogs, 19 died within that same period (6.7 percent), a ratio of six to one. These results support an earlier study led by Warwick Anderson at the Baker Medical Research Institute in Australia, which indicated that pet owners had lower cholesterol levels than did nonowners and were therefore less at risk of heart disease.
Friedmann’s original results were questioned by some researchers, but she has verified them more than once. In 2003, for example, she and her colleagues at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York reported in the American Journal of Cardiology on a group of 102 patients who’d had a heart attack in the previous two years, including 35 patients who had owned a pet. Her team investigated the variability in the heart rates of these patients, a measure that ind
icates how well the heart is likely to handle stress. An increase in variability is linked to a lower risk of heart disease and death, and Friedmann’s group found that the variability measures were higher in pet owners than in nonowners.
In 1994 the results of studies such as these prompted the largest of all surveys up to that time—the Australian People and Pets Survey—a national investigation, conducted by Bruce Headey, of more than a thousand people aged sixteen and over, some of whom were pet owners and some not. The aim of this survey was to quantify the extent to which the therapeutic benefits of pet ownership reduces the medical needs of the owners. Headey found that people who owned a cat and/or a dog required, on average, 5 percent less expenditure on treatments and medications than did nonowners, which in the case of Australia meant a cost saving of 1.8 billion Australian dollars* across the whole country. And within this group the differences between the number of doctor visits and the levels of medication required by dog owners who felt close to their dogs,† and the medical care of those who either were nonowners or who had a dog but did not feel close to it, were even more marked than that average figure of 5 percent. Another important result of this survey was to confirm the significance of pets in the lives of people who live without partners—the single, the separated, the divorced, and the widowed—confirming that dogs can act as surrogate companions for those who lack a satisfactory network of human “social support.”*
