Pets could boost wellbeing as much as a wife or husband, study suggests
Pennsylvania resident Cory Neidig cuddles with his beagle, Louie and his golden retriever, Jack. (Photo credit: Monica Danielle)
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(CNN) — Having a cat or a dog to keep you company could boost your wellbeing as much as being married or meeting up regularly with friends and relatives, new research suggests.
The study, which was published on March 31 in the journal Social Indicators Research, concludes that having an animal companion is worth up to £70,000 ($90,000) a year in life satisfaction – a metric economists use to quantify the “implicit price” of otherwise intangible things.
That figure is roughly the same as the theoretical boost in income you would get from having a spouse or meeting up with friends and relatives regularly, researchers said, comparing their findings with other studies that have used the same statistical method.
The results surprised even the researchers. “First when I obtained the values I was surprised; I was thinking that is a lot of money even for me who loves (pets),” said Adelina Gschwandtner, an economics professor at the University of Kent, who co-authored the paper.
Then, she thought, “most people claim that their pets are like friends or family members to them, so that is comparable,” she told CNN.
“If pets are indeed like friends and family, why shouldn’t that measure be comparable to talking to friends and family once a week? You have your pet every day.”
Although the mental and physical health benefits of having a dog, in particular, are well known, there is more debate among scientists surrounding the overall impact of pets on their owners’ wellbeing.
“(It’s) a little bit more complex than people think,” says Megan Mueller, an associate professor at Tufts University, who studies the relationship between people and animals and wasn’t involved in this study.
“A lot of us perceive our pets as contributing to our life satisfaction but depending on how you measure that in the research it comes out different ways,” she told CNN, adding that she was unfamiliar with the specific statistical analysis Gschwandtner used in this study.
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In their study, Gschwandtner and her co-author Michael Gmeiner, an assistant profes sor of economics at the London School of Economics, used data collected in a long-running survey of 2,500 British households.
Rather than simply comparing life satisfaction and pet ownership, which would reveal little except a correlation between the two variables, the economists then set about proving a causal link.
To do this, they used a complicated statistical tool known as an instrumental variables approach. This works by finding “a third variable which is correlated with … in our case the pets but is not correlated with life satisfaction,” Gschwandtner explained.
“And so what this variable tries to capture is potential omitted variables, potential reverse causation.”
For example, the authors wrote, “It could be that happy and healthy people decide to take a pet as a companion rather than pets making people happy and healthy.” So, in their research, they used survey data on personality types as well as pet ownership and life satisfaction, to control for this factor.
If pets improve life satisfaction as much as the study suggests, Gschwandtner called on policymakers to make it easier for people to own them, for example by relaxing regulations that restrict renters’ access to them.
However, Mueller cautioned against “anthropomorphizing pets too much” and equating our relationships with them to our relationships with other humans.
“There’s some elements that are similar,” she said. “And we know that social support and emotional support are really key aspects of human-pet relationships that are also the same types of support we get from our human social connections… While animals are connected to us in powerful ways, they are not the same as humans.”
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