Pet Ownership – Maybe Not For Better Health, Perhaps Sense Of Humour?

by podblack on December 18, 2008

Entry for the PLoS ONE Second Birthday Synchroblogging Competition -To Have or Not To Have a Pet for Better Health? (Koivusilta & Ojanlatva, 2006) – PLoS ONE @ Two.

Upon deciding to enter the PLoS ONE second birthday competition, I decided to find some additional books, annotate the article twice, get myself all organised – and then the cat came into the house.

See, originally I was planning on writing about the paper ‘Losing the Big Picture: How Religion May Control Visual Attention‘ (fascinating paper by Colzato, van den Wildenberg and Hommel, 2008). Got all my skepticism books and research on belief, all lined up.

…then Willow arrived and tried to climb into my lap as I typed.

Willow is usually an oriental-shaped body, almond-eyed calico cat (definition of calico can be found on the likes of Wikipedia, which may result in making stupid twoodly noises at the pictures, especially the one where a medium-haired orange and black tortoiseshell with freckles on its nose is either about to climb their owner’s leg for a hug… or use it as a scratching post).

Willow typically features white for her dominant coat colour. But Willow, against all commonly held preconceptions about the domestic cat (Felis catus), is not an example of cleanliness and fastidiousness.

She is, in short, a grotty moggy.

The area around my house features a lawn. There’s a small amount of yellow sand in a patch on the lawn, left over from some earlier filling-in work. That is not, however, what Willow appeared to have merrily rolled in – it certainly didn’t smell that way either.

Koivusilta and Ojanlatva are interested in commonly held conceptions about domesticated animals too. Their present study, which looks at the health benefits of having a pet, involved drawing upon baseline data from the 15-year Health and Social Support Study (the HeSSup Study). The Finnish Population Register Centre was used to draw population-based random samples stratified according to gender and four age groups (20–24, 30–34, 40–44, and 50–54 years). A wonderfully large total of 21,101 working-aged Finns responded to the baseline survey questionnaire of the 15-year HeSSup Study in 1998 (Koivusilta & Ojanlatva, 2006).

Previous studies into the benefits of owning a pet included moderate associations of pet ownership with lower blood pressure; less risk of heart attack or stroke with volunteer participants and the potential of coping with adverse life effects better if you had a pet. People self-reported that they felt they had better physical and pscyhological health, visited a doctor less – and yet ‘cross-sectional surveys have not indicated associations of pet ownership with cardiovascular health benefits per se.’ (Koivusilta & Ojanlatva, 2006). Studies even contradicted themselves when the issue of stress was raised. The various samples taken in the past have made it difficult to come up with multivariate analyses – so Koivusilta and Ojanlatva (2006) decided to take the step of analysing a sample of

…general working-aged population groups in order to provide comparison data for past selective groups involving old age and/or poor health. Socio-demographic factors together with health risk factors, including exercise were taken into account.

Since obesity is a pervasive problem in industrialised countries and also a leading contributor to preventable deaths (Pi-Sunyer, 1999),with about 6000 people dying in Australia every year from problems that stem from obesity let alone obesity itself (Mathers, et al., 1999), you can see why people might be interested in figuring out whether a pet can help out with overall health. Determining whether a person is overweight or obese involves calculating the individual’s body mass index (or BMI – the weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared). It should be noted that the BMI doesn’t take into account potential differences in muscle mass though. BMIs have been studied in conjunction with frequency of depressive episodes and suicide attempts in a large-scale study involving 40,000 participants (Bray, 1998 with ‘Genes Load the Gun, The Environment Pulls the Trigger’) – an indicator of the different standards of attractiveness amongst men and women can be seen in how higher BMIs amongst women and lower BMIs amongst men are associated with depression and suicidal ideation (Carpenter, Hasin, Allison, & Faith, 2000).

The study set out with ascertaining whether owners had a dog, cat, other pet; whether it was feasible to have a pet anyway (in some cases, it might be ‘impossible to keep’). Koivusilta and Ojanlatva also considered the influence of a dog on overall health with a new variable – ‘dog plus additional pets within the same family vs. other pets’ in order to see if whether dog owners are different from the others and/or potentially moved about more in health promotion terms in comparison to those who don’t have a dog.

Although I can see why the emphasis on dogs and the typical association of exercising via walking is important to the study, I should probably point out that the activities of:

catching filthy cat;
trying to wash off the worst smelly bits off the filthy cat;
watching filthy (now wet) cat climb the blinds trying to escape;
having filthy wet cat run outside and capture bird;
wrestle bird off filthy, wet cat and try to set it free whilst simultaneously holding slippery cat back from catching bird again;
take filthy, wet cat inside and have cat dart into the clean bedlinens on the bed and pretend to be a pillow, albeit one that snarls;
go outside and resuscitate bird who is still trying to figure out why it is not only stunned but wet and smells like disgusting cat

could possibly be factors that future studies by Koivusilta and Ojanlatva might not have considered, which could add to both exercise levels and heart-rate? Whether one adds bird-ownership into the scenario could be considered too. Mind, I don’t think that the stress factors are really something that is really beneficial in this case, for any of us.

Amongst the conclusions of the study, it was found that:

The associations of poor perceived health with pet ownership were present among both genders (Table 3), among 30–34-year-olds, among those in couple relationships, among those with no vocational training, living in a row/semi-detached house, or not working in agriculture.

…Pet ownership was very lightly associated with poor health in the general working-aged population when using several health and disease indicators. Pet owners had a slightly higher BMI than the rest, which indicates that people having a pet (particularly a dog) could use some exercise.

It appears that it all boils down to mostly being the influence of the individual’s BMI as those who are more ’set in their ways’ require more than a regular dog-walk as a cure-all. It wasn’t discounted that the friendship benefits and comfort of having an animal as a pet is a beneficial factor – but I would be interested in the death of a pet might be considered as an influence on one’s mental as well as physical health in a future study. It’s something that Dr Karen Stollznow of the Australian Skeptics investigates in regards to pet psychics and their questionable claims, I’ve noticed.

By the way, Willow, in the picture, is doing her usual ‘I’m Cinderella and I’ll sleep in the hearth area of the fireplace because no body appears to love me when I smell so good‘.

Select References:

Bray, G.A. (1999). Contemporary diagnosis and management of obesity. Newton, PA: Handbooks in Health Care.

Koivusilta, LK. and Ojanlatva, A. (2006) To Have or Not To Have a Pet for Better Health? PLoS ONE 1(1): e109. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000109.

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