The Benefits of Owning a Pet
By Kirsten Holmes
In society people tend to use animals as a coping mechanism after a traumatic event happens. Animals help you cope with death ,divorce, and depression. In fact, according to a 2002 survey by the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, 62 percent of American households include pets. Pets teach us how to love , and also improve our emotional and physical health by providing us with unconditional affection and friendship. Not only do pets give us many things as you will read about but all they want in return is love, food and shelter. Animals help by lowering people's cholesterol levels and lowering their blood pressure too. Studies show that dogs increase survival rates for people who have had cardiac arrest problems before.
Dogs make people improve their physical activity that also strengthens your heart and helps your blood circulation circulate better . Also Children who grow up with pets can have less risk of having asthma and allergies vs people who don’t own animals. Owning an animal makes you socialize more with people and decreases your loneliness. Dogs can feel your emotions more than any other animal. Dogs can understand the words we use when we give them command but they can sense how we feel through the tone of our voice and the gestures we make. Dogs can look at your eyes and feel your emotional state and they'll try to figure out what that person's thinking by just looking at them. For example when a person's angry or happy dogs can sense that. All though the pets don’t last forever , the little time that they are here makes a huge impact on somebody. Believe it or not but owning a pet means less visits to the hospital and children who have pets are less likely to be to absent from school .
Also I learned that seeing-eye dogs can be trained to detect seizures, animals can also be used in many other situations that normally you wouldn't think they could do. For example speech therapy, occupational therapy or physical rehabilitation to help patients recover from their injuries.Most people think of their pets as members of the family and when there animal dies they think of it as one of there family members dying and greve like it was one of the family members dying. I can say from personal experience of owning 2 cats I consider my animals apart of my family, when I find myself stressed out I find that my cats help me calm down when I’m petting them maybe it’s because of the cats purring noise that is a soothing noise . Pets serve many purposes as you can see or have experienced. When people had a dog or cat with them while they were taking a test it showed to help improve the children's score because having the animal around them in a stressful situation helped them calm down and not be as stressed as they normally would be in a quiet classroom. The children made less errors in their math when they had an animal's present. This all shows that animals help in many ways whether it’s physical health or emotional health. When children with anxiety are exposed to animals it’s shown to help improve their anxiety. For example in an article called “The benefits of pets for human health” written by Dana Casciotti and Diana zuckerman it shows that at one visit, a dog was in the room and at the other visit the dog was not. When the dog was in the room , the child had lower heart rates, and blood pressure. Although studies can not be pinpointed on any particular person but there are some studies that show owning a cat or dog can or can't help your allergies it just depends on the person.
Pets can help children emotional development for example when a child has no brothers or sisters, pets can help children learn empathy towards others and help their self esteem go up.More research is needed on how pets can influence a child's development and health outcomes. The effects animals have on people’s health is not fully understood because it is hard to figure out and study exactly the effects animals have on people. Animals bring so much to our lives health benefits, school benefits ,a companion and even become a family member that’s why we all love them so much. You may not know this but walking with a dog has been found to increase social interaction with strangers, compared to walking without a dog you might not talk to anyone if you don’t have an animal with you. Everybody body's heard the saying a dog is a man's best friend and some people completely believe it animals can understand us in a way that humans can’t.
