Study reveals new benefits of having pets

International

A NEW research study showed that having a cat or a dog could boost one’s wellbeing as much as being married or meeting up regularly with friends and relatives.

In a report by CNN, the study, which was published on March 31 in the journal Social Indicators Research, found 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.

According to researchers, the figure is roughly the same as the theoretical boost in income that a person would get from having a spouse or meeting up with friends and relatives regularly.

Researchers themselves were surprised by the result of the study.

“First when I obtained the values I was surprised; I was thinking that is a lot of money even for me who loves (pets),” Adelina Gschwandtner, an economics professor at the University of Kent, who co-authored the paper, said in the CNN report.

Gschwandtner added that most people claim that their pets are like friends or family members to them, so that is comparable.

“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,” Gschwandtner said.

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,” said Megan Mueller, an associate professor at Tufts University, who studies the relationship between people and animals and wasn’t involved in this study.

In their study, Gschwandtner and her co-author Michael Gmeiner, an assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics, used data collected in a long-running survey of 2,500 British households.

Instead of just 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.