A woman coming back home wants her cat’s affection. They hypothesize that interacting with animals releases oxytocin, a hormone that is associated with a variety of heath promoting effects, and that the intensity, duration, and type of interaction mediates the relationship between interaction and health outcomes. In a test of the buffering effect hypothesis, researchers tested whether animals could moderate the anxiety inducing effects of a stressful situation [14]. Therefore, it is possible that some of the positive associations between health and dog ownership found in studies that did not adjust for income could be over- or underestimated due to selection bias. No, Is the Subject Area "Mental health and psychiatry" applicable to this article? This benefit may extend to children as well; research found that the odds of being overweight were lower for any young children who lived in a dog owning household [13]. Instead they may be more comfortable in smaller social groups, eg with a few close friends. In some cases the depth of feeling for their chosen species. By Jing. "There is a small difference in personality between the average personality between dog owners and cat owners but it’s comparatively small." Understanding these mechanisms is vital for understanding how pets might impact health so that we can translate findings into broader public health policy. Data Availability: Data are available from UCLA Center for Health Policy Research: http://healthpolicy.ucla.edu/chis/data/Pages/overview.aspx. Recent work by Beetz and colleagues [16] pulled together the evidence on the impact of human-animal interaction research to present a unified theory on the causal mechanism for the wide array of consistent impacts (e.g., social attention and behavior, interpersonal interactions, mood, heart rate, blood pressure, fear and anxiety, mental and physical health and cardiovascular function) and inconsistent effects (on stress and epinephrine/norepinephrine, immune system functioning, pain management, aggression, empathy, learning). However, sometimes there are problems due to the differences in personality between that of the owner and that of the pet. BMI, and general health were not associated with cat ownership after adjusting for other characteristics. In 2018, Mars Petcare conducted a survey of 1000 cat owners and 1000 dog owners and found some unique distinctions between the two groups. It should be noted that the sample size was small (58 individuals), focused on a limited set of proximal outcomes, which may not translate into public health outcomes. They may possess a more abstract thinking style, in comparison to … The goal of the present research is to investigate pet attachment and measure the connection between owner-pet attachment and interpersonal attachment characteristics of dog owners and cat owners, social support and loneliness. Pet owners and non-pet owners differ across many socio-demographic variables, such as gender, age, race, living arrangements, income, and employment status. In one of the most methodologically sophisticated studies examining this phenomenon, Headey and Grabka [27] employed propensity score matching to ensure, as far as possible, equivalence in owners and non-owners in Germany. If pet ownership is demonstrated to provide mental, social, and/or physical health benefits for adults, children, or adolescents at the population level, it could provide a relatively cost-effective way to promote health. Research examining potential differences between pet owners and non-owners is prevalent in the scientific literature, but findings have often been inconsistent. Several differences between the groups emerged, and in all cases, pet owners were happier, healthier and better adjusted than were non-owners. One study found that they make fewer visits to the doctor and take less medication [26]. Many people correlate being a pet owner with having a higher well being. Another method, regression discontinuity design [44], may also be employed, particularly if exploring the impact of the dosage of the interaction on health outcomes. ¬)Ä�’hâ©d¬u>íª¸Rğc�Àx½²,ãÚ‘TX|Z’P Finally, we provide guidance on how to properly model the effects of pet ownership on health to accurately estimate this relationship in the general population. Pet owners and non-pet owners were similar in depression (t = –1.80, p = 0.08) and salivary CRP levels (t = 0.27, p = 0.79). Researchers have also hypothesized the mechanisms through which pets affect psychological wellbeing. We include a discussion about how the factors associated with the selection into the pet ownership group are related to a range of mental and physical health outcomes. that pet owners and non-pet owners differ across many traits, including gender, age, race/ ethnicity, living arrangements, and income. Yes It is also assumed that individuals with the same preference for type of pet … CHIS is the largest state-level health survey and is designed to provide population-based estimates for the state of California, California counties, and major ethnic groups. Differences between the sexes (of the owners) were also recorded. In terms of health differences—which should not be considered to be outcomes or predictors of ownership because our study is purely correlational—pet owners were more likely to have asthma, and dog owners were more likely to have higher BMIs; but otherwise, there were no differences between pet and non-pet owners in general health and BMI. Each of the multivariate analyses was subjected to a large number of sensitivity and robustness tests, including additional variables and alternative ways of coding age, gender, marital status, and household employment. For example, researchers have found that owners scored higher There are key limitations common to this body of work that prevent causal links between human animal interaction and health outcomes, even when associations are found. Previous research suggests that pet owners are psychologically different than non-owners in terms of self-esteem and other personality characteristics. In other words, pet owners might be different to begin with. Most problematic, these studies use convenience samples that may not be representative of the general population, examine a narrow range of outcome variables, and use cross sectional designs that do not consider long-term health outcomes. For example, there is ample evidence that socioeconomic status is related to a number of health outcomes [37–39, 41]. These multivariate results also show that lower odds of owning a cat are associated with older age and non-white race. We add another note of caution about the causal direction of the effect of pet ownership on health when using cross-sectional data—deciding whether certain health and/or health-related characteristics should be included in the selection model will be extremely important since the directionality of the cause and effect could go in either direction for some variables (e.g., someone who is not physically active does not adopt a dog vs. someone is less physically active because they do not have a dog). No, Is the Subject Area "Hispanic people" applicable to this article? Additionally, California, the state with the largest population in the US, differs from the rest of the country in culture, climate, and geography. �ğ¶æ‰èŒT¿ÅĞò�q‚ø©¡•o:�-6�Î2î/ì‘]8»~Ši æ½wŸXɉêª?ĞàÂwöŸJº`âlÅêLkIª‚@EjY×…q¯5Ú§HòtÜÇv´cÖ6i ¤å’Á¬�0MÀ]Y¦³UÿôN;İM]ŠÅ¥‘0¯ù]z¼íß÷Ö[{Æs¬1uO[6ïËbÄeÁÊ#¦9Ãkè°~dş�/ÏîYøï›pMAõ.=Œë¤�P\|ªW#?şW$izÂóğ8ï1¥ô¶ZL âÒ¢÷r³i^³�õÖäô˜?WP]â±ãö‘±µ–X A.è@ı çûŠ‹ÉÖz[© ú¯75Ùñy§ãêì6œïŠ›k .ŞU*ı³3}�hA\ô“t& �’¸§ÆHóìåW!™QœÕ =ï+ÌĞĞ“ A 5, Jessica Saunders, Layla Parast, Susan H. Babey, Jeremy V. Miles, Exploring the differences between pet and non-pet owners: Implications for human-animal interaction research and policy. The best evidence of the positive effect of animals on physical, mental, and emotional health has focused on a therapeutic environment, termed animal assisted therapy, because the studies use experimental designs that do not suffer from the problems inherent in observational studies [17, 18]. Now, a Mars Petcare survey of 1,000 dog owners vs. 1,000 cat owners is providing more concrete proof as to the differences between cat and dog people. Thus, these findings illustrate that pet and non-pet owners differ, but in no way represent all the differences between the groups. We recommend propensity score matching utilizing boosted regression since the exact relationship between socio-demographic characteristics and pet ownership is unknown. We do know that pet ownership cannot change some biological variables, such as gender, age, and race; but it is plausible that pet ownership may influence other variables, including health-related characteristics. For example, White respondents were 3.14 times more likely to own a dog, a fairly large difference, while married people are 34% more likely to own a dog, a comparatively smaller difference. Additionally, each study looked at a small range of dependent measures, thus limiting their ability to detect costs or benefits beyond the scope of the study and thus not providing any measure of “net effects.”. In addition, while the odds of owning a dog are higher for respondents with a higher BMI, the magnitude of this effect is very small with an OR = 1.006. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179494.t004. Household income was not associated with ownership in the adjusted model, see Table 3. Is the Subject Area "Dogs" applicable to this article? According to some research, pet owners are indeed different across a wide range of variables that are also related to health; however there are only a few empirical studies that help us understand how they may be different and how large that difference may be. Therefore, we model two different regressions: one set that includes variables that can never (or are unlikely to be) changed by pet ownership; and another that includes a set of variables that might be influenced by pet ownership. While each of these quasi-experimental methods can help reduce selection bias, they also require careful consideration for proper identification of instruments, cutoffs, and covariates. The researchers randomly assigned participants to one of five groups: they were asked to pet a rabbit, a turtle, a toy rabbit, a toy turtle, or they were assigned to a control group. This study represents the most rigorous causal test of pet ownership on overall health, using doctor visits as a proxy. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179494, Editor: Meghan Byrne, Public Library of Science, UNITED STATES, Received: November 4, 2015; Accepted: May 31, 2017; Published: June 23, 2017. However, because this is a cross-sectional nature of our study, it is not possible to conclude that dogs cause asthma, that asthma sufferers are more likely to own dogs, or that there is another way that both dog owners and asthma sufferers differ from one another. One research line has focused on how pet ownership may improve the physical health of owners. However, another study found that heart attack patients with dogs were more likely to have another attack or hospital readmission than dog owners [9]. The data are over a decade old and may not accurately reflect current health trends—however, this study’s main purpose is to demonstrate the importance of selection bias in research, and there is no reason to believe that the presence of selection bias would have changed over time. No, Is the Subject Area "Pets and companion animals" applicable to this article? Other potential methods could use natural experiments and instrumental variable approaches [43], with some potential instruments being different housing policies surrounding pet ownership. These differences were all quite small, although the race differences were even more pronounced between cat- and non-cat owners than dog- and non-dog owners: White respondents were 4.64 times more likely to own a cat than respondents from other races. Patients who owned a dog had a much higher rate of one year survival– 6% of dog owning patients did not survive their first year, compared to 28% of non-dog owning patients. In other words, can we trust research that examines pet owners and non-pet owners and then tries to make causal attributions about differences in health? Yes that pet owners and non-pet owners differ across many traits, including gender, age, race/ ethnicity, living arrangements, and income. This literature suggests that health varies as a function of a number of sociodemographic factors including age, gender, race, income, education, marital status, employment, and housing. The authors tested 82 pet owners and 48 non-pet owners in this survey and paid special attention to the personality characteristics of pet owners highly attached to their pets. Although some researchers have incorporated animal preference into their investigations of pet ownership, such research is scarce and inconclusive. They support their theory using the findings from 69 empirical studies that ranged in population, methods, measures, and design; however, the theory has yet to be specifically tested. Dog and cat owners differ in personality. Some studies have indicated differences between owners and non-owners whereas others have not. In Survey 2, owners of mixed-breeds reported their dogs’ behaviour as more problematic (t-test, N = 6,384 t = 5.577; p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.140), than the owners … The health benefits of human-animal interaction has been also been studied in clinical patients and the findings are contradictory. The differences in dog ownership between the races remained large, with Hispanic, Asian, and Black respondents being 68%, 71%, and 61% less likely to own a dog than White respondents, respectively. For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click In our analyses, it appears that it may inflate them, as pet owner characteristics are associated with better mental and physical health outcomes. Forty-nine percent of respondents were male; 26.0% were Hispanic, 51.6% were White, 11.7% were Asian, 6.3% were Black, 4.4% were another race; 61.9% were married; and the average respondent age was 44.4. Yes Dog owners were also more likely to also own a cat. Yes This research has some limitations. Other studies have documented negative effects of pets including dog bites, spreading of disease, and have shown that pet ownership is associated with asthma and other allergies [4–8], and associations with a higher incidence of heart attacks and readmissions in heart attack patients [9]. Approximately sixty-two percent of the American population live with a pet [1], and it is generally believed that these pets provide mental and physical health benefits to their human companions [2]. Research investigating pet owners’ personalities has tended to focus on the relationship between personality and pet preference or attachment style, or the complementarity of owner and pet personality and associated owner satisfaction [90–94]. We further examine the relationship between ownership and each of these characteristics using survey-weighted logistic regression models in the next sections. In comparison, cat people were generally about 12 percent more neurotic ; however, they were also 11 percent more open than dog people. The model was less effective at predicting cat ownership—again, apartment dwellers were less likely to own a cat, females were also more likely to own a cat, and there was a slight age effect, with respondents aged from 45 to 64 more likely to own a cat than other age groups. Is there something about pet owners that is inherently different about these groups that may also affect health? The socio-demographic differences between pet and non-pet owners are not trivial, especially when examining different mental, emotional, and physical health differences across groups—there is a large research literature demonstrating the important role of many of these socio-demographic factors as determinants of health [34–38]. One explanation for this could be that the DMA is not very good at predicting the future behavior of dogs, and that the missing association between dog personality and dog–owner relationship scores is caused by the temporal separation between the behavioral assessments of the dogs and the owners' answers on the MDORS, in the present study between 0.5 and 2.5 years. That is, with a large sample size, a difference may be significance but the size of the difference may not be meaningful. Both studies provide strong evidence for stress buffering effects, but their methods limit the researchers’ abilities in concluding that these effects lead to any long term psychological of physical health benefits in a sample drawn from the general population. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179494.t001. While this study clearly demonstrates that isolating pet ownership from confounds is important for precise estimates of its causal impact, it falls short of a definitive answer since there are other differences limiting its generalizability, such as cultural differences between German and Australia samples, the use of doctor’s visits as a proxy for health, potential missing variable bias, among others. The odds ratio for a dichotomous variable should be interpreted as follows: A number over 1 means that this characteristic is positively related to pet ownership, e.g., Home owners OR = 2.72, meaning home owners are 2.72 times more likely to own a dog. Only 7.3% had current asthma, the average BMI was 26.6, and the average self-reported general health was 3.5 (where 1 = poor and 5 = excellent). Some of our observed differences were quite large and some comparatively small. No, Is the Subject Area "Socioeconomic aspects of health" applicable to this article? In terms of health differences—which should not be considered to be outcomes or predictors of ownership because our study is purely correlational—pet owners were more likely to have asthma, and dog owners were more likely to have higher BMIs; but otherwise, there were no differences between pet and non-pet owners in general health and BMI. Any of these differences may moderate the impact of pet ownership on health which could limit the generalizability to the rest of the country. Most of the research on pet ownership and health outcomes compares pet owners with non-pet owners, but is this an appropriate comparison to make? Given our large sample size, the effect size of these differences must be considered in addition to the significance level. Two theories exist regarding the effects of social support—the ‘main effect’ hypothesis suggests that the beneficial effects are diffuse, the ‘buffering’ hypothesis suggests that social support effects are notable only in the presence of stressors. Although we were able to examine the relationship of a large number of socio-demographic variables with pet ownership, there are likely other key selection differences that make the groups nonequivalent. Furthermore some of the Cohens’s d effect sizes for the differences between the two populations were medium (d = 0.5) or almost large (d = 0.8). In addition, much research indicates that African Americans and Hispanics have worse health outcomes compared to whites [38, 41]. These results show that respondents who were female and single, owned a home, lived in a house, had higher annual household income, lived in a more rural location, had a larger household size, and lived in a household where everyone worked full time were more likely to own a dog while respondents of older age and of non-white race were less likely to own a dog. This study examines how pet and non-pet owners differ across a variety of socio-demographic and health measures, which has implications for the proper interpretation of a large number of correlational studies that attempt to draw causal attributions. Although some pet owners and non-owners might fit these stereotypes, studies have failed to confirm them for most. There is conflicting evidence about whether living with pets results in better mental and physical health outcomes, with the majority of the empirical research evidence being inconclusive due to methodological limitations. This is not surprising, as experimental designs where people or families are randomly assigned to be pet- or non-pet owners, would be extremely challenging. Most dog owners exercise their dogs, and although not the primary aim, exercising one’s dog also usually involves exercising oneself. In a follow up study, they further explored this result, finding that there were differences in heart rate variability between pet owners and non-owners who had survived a heart attack, and suggested that this may be a mediating factor in the effect of pets on survival [25]. From a sample of 268 dog and 97 cat owners, significant differences on pet attachment appeared between pet owners’ gender, Two experiments provide evidence of these mechanisms, but how these results translate into long term differences in animal owners’ health is unknown.
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