Pets prolong your life
Scientists have concluded that pets not only provide companionship but may also contribute to their owners' longevity.
NST, 18 Dec 2001

FROM the art galleries of cork Street to the lecture halls of Rio de Janeiro, animals are to the fore. At the Waddington Gallery in the West End, London, Craigie Aitchison uses his striking sense of colour - growing ever more lively with his passing years - to illustrate his artistic attachment to a menagerie of dogs, canaries and sheep.

Across the road at the Redfern, Kathleen Hale's gripping illustrations for Orlando the Marmalade Cat, and other pictures, leap at you from the jungles and the gallery walls. Hale died last year aged 102 - even older than Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, another well-known animal-lover.

The scientists who gathered at the ninth international conference on Human-Animal Interactions, held in Rio, would have had no doubt that both women's fondness for animals had contributed to their longevity.

The research papers presented at the Rio conference gave plenty of good reasons why having a pet or pets can prolong life.

They confirmed the well-established belief that keeping a companionable animal lowers blood pressure, eases a person's perception of the level of stress they are suffering, improves their chance of survival after a life-threatening illness and, perhaps surprisingly, far from making them reclusive, not only provides them with companionship but enhances the dog or cat owner's ability to make friends with other people.

Tanja Hoff and Reinhold Bergler presented research on the influence that a household dog could have on the child whose parents had divorced. A year after the divorce, children who had a dog were compared with those who came from a dogless household.

Those with the advantage of canine companionship while domestic dramas raged around them were better socially integrated and less aggressive than those without it.

The latter group of children tended to show more extreme behaviour, being, in particular, more stubborn, more irritable and more prone to vandalism.

Dr Bergler suggested that a dog provided unconditional emotional support, a commodity in short supply when harried parents are divorcing.

Looking after a dog needs a sense of responsibility, and thereby provides the child with an interest other than the pervading martial disharmony and their own anxieties.

Research by Dr June McNicholas and her colleagues from the University of Warwick, was also presented in Rio.

Their study was on the role of pets in providing loving care and kindness after serious surgery.

It looked at women aged between 50 and 60 who were recovering from surgery for breast cancer. Almost 90 per cent of those who had a pet said that it fulfilled at least one important supportive role during a difficult time. Nearly half said that they were indebted to their pets on 10 or more counts.

After surgery, the pet was not only a good companion, but taking the dog for a walk also helped patients to feel that they were again part of the community, and had left behind the hospital ward and all that it stood for.  A research paper by Andrea Beetz, from the University of Erlangen in Germany, analysed differences in the psyche of cat and dog lovers. People who are likely to favour the cat tend to be competitive and creative, with an interest in the arts.

But although they may be ambitious and have a need for achievement, they do not always succeed in achieving power and prestige.

Conversely, dog-owners are, according to Dr Beetz, dutiful, enduring and self-sufficient, but not always adventurous when it comes to taking advantage of new experiences. --- The Times