Why owning a dog is good for you

They boost happiness hormones and compensate for family breakdown – no wonder dog ownership is soaring

Deborah Ross - Read Complete article Here - timesonline.co.uk March 6, 2010

What is this relationship I have with my dog? What is anybody’s relationship with their dog? To put it another way: just what is the status of humans and dogs these days?

Whatever else, dogs are doing something right. Heck, they’re so good even the Chinese are thinking about not eating them any more and, in the UK, the dog population has shot up from 6.4 million to 10.5 million in the past 20 years. There are still working dogs – dogs that flush, herd, retrieve, guard and merrily throttle rats – but almost all the increase has been in “companion dogs”

Dr James Serpell, director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania and he says that, whatever else, today’s dogs certainly perform an important human function. “We’ve seen an explosion in pet populations in all industrialized countries in the past two decades,” he says. “And I keep coming back to the notion that dogs are providing people with a form of non-human support where traditional support has broken down. People are turning to dogs to compensate for that loss.” And he adds: “If you look at all the demographic statistics people are getting divorced more, having fewer children and have fewer friends as well as less social contact. A graph showing this decline is almost a mirror image of the one showing the rise in pet ownership.” Is this healthy? “Some people would say dogs do the job better than other humans when it comes to relationships. People have few conflicts with their pets, whereas human relations can have a nasty side. You can get dogs with horrendous behavior problems, but the relationship is very complementary on the whole.”

According to researchers at the University of Japan, dog owners experience a surge in the hormone oxytocin after periods of playing with their dogs or simply being gazed at by them. Oxytocin has been nicknamed the “cuddle chemical” for the role it plays in the mother-child bond. It produces positive, warm feelings and because it’s a serious stress reducer – it dampens down the area of the brain associated with anxiety – may also help explain the myriad health benefits associated with dog ownership.

So the things dog-owners have felt intuitively all along, that dog’s have a sixth sense and know how you’re feeling, might be true? “The thing we consistently find about dogs is that they are incredibly perceptive. While they may not have some of the human capabilities, they can behave as if they have because they are so perceptive about what is going on.” This makes sense biologically. If the dog is dependent on us, it needs to know where our behavior is going. Are we in a bad mood? Should it keep out of our way? Further, research in Hungary is showing that if a dog is trained to understand the pointing gesture and two bowls are put out – one containing food and one not – the dog will over-ride what his nose is telling him and go to the empty bowl if the human is pointing at it. “The dog always wants to be where the human is,” says Professor Mills, “and is just so incredibly tuned into our body language.”

The study of domestic dogs is a new discipline – previously, domestic dogs were considered too “artificial” to be worth the bother – and there are, he says, exciting discoveries to come. Work is being done in social cognition, language cognition and the role of dogs in child development. “If you look at family psychology, which has been going on for 50 years, the role of the pet has hardly been considered. In some cities, mainly associated with poverty, a child is more likely to grow up with a dog than it is a father. That’s really quite a shocking statistic, and psychology hasn’t even thought about it.” So it’s not all about being the dog’s boss then? “That,” he says, “is rubbish. And such a primate way to think. There is no evidence dogs can use social status to motivate behavior. It’s a really good example of anthropomorphism. Humans may think in terms of being motivated by a hierarchy, but there is no evidence a dog’s brain is capable of that.” How would he, then, describe the relationship between man and dog today? “It’s like a family friendship,” he says.

Domestic dogs are phenomenal. They look to us, are in tune with us and want to know us even when we are not worth knowing. You may say that the average dog’s life isn’t “natural”, but who is to say what nature intended? At some point in their history, wolves attached themselves to humans and became dogs. And as Rowlands notes: “To the extent that nature has intentions at all, this was part of her intentions no more and no less than wolves remaining wolves.” I ask Professor Mills if he feels sorry for the average urban pooch and he says no, not at all. Dogs are endlessly adaptable, and as long as you don’t forget the dog in the dog, and offer exercise, stimulation and company, a dog can have a good life anywhere.