We use a large, population-based survey from California administered in 2003 (n = 42,044) and find that pet owners and non-pet owners differ across many traits, including gender, age, race/ethnicity, living arrangements, and income. From a sample of 268 dog and 97 cat owners, significant differences on pet attachment appeared between pet owners’ gender, Yes The current research found that income and full-time employment were associated with increased likelihood of dog ownership. Finally, we provide guidance on how to properly model the effects of pet ownership on health to accurately estimate this relationship in the general population. The model was less effective at predicting cat ownership—again, apartment dwellers were less likely to own a cat, females were also more likely to own a cat, and there was a slight age effect, with respondents aged from 45 to 64 more likely to own a cat than other age groups. Propensity score modeling can decrease bias by 58% to 96%, depending on the covariates used in the model and outcome variable [42], but it is by no means the only modeling technique that can help account for potential selection bias in observational data. Both studies provide strong evidence for stress buffering effects, but their methods limit the researchers’ abilities in concluding that these effects lead to any long term psychological of physical health benefits in a sample drawn from the general population. The best evidence of the positive effect of animals on physical, mental, and emotional health has focused on a therapeutic environment, termed animal assisted therapy, because the studies use experimental designs that do not suffer from the problems inherent in observational studies [17, 18]. that pet owners and non-pet owners differ across many traits, including gender, age, race/ ethnicity, living arrangements, and income. In a follow up study, they further explored this result, finding that there were differences in heart rate variability between pet owners and non-owners who had survived a heart attack, and suggested that this may be a mediating factor in the effect of pets on survival [25]. ¬)Ä�’hâ©d¬u>íª¸Rğc�Àx½²,ãÚ‘TX|Z’P Differences between the sexes (of the owners) were also recorded. Given our large sample size, the effect size of these differences must be considered in addition to the significance level. Dog and cat owners differ in personality. In addition, much research indicates that African Americans and Hispanics have worse health outcomes compared to whites [38, 41]. Only 7.3% had current asthma, the average BMI was 26.6, and the average self-reported general health was 3.5 (where 1 = poor and 5 = excellent). These differences are also associated with health, so when trying to draw causal inference about pet ownership using a general population sample, selection bias should be accounted for (or at least acknowledged), as it could lead to an over- or under-estimation of pet ownership’s true effects. We investigated the extent to which personality match between dog and owner is related to pet satisfaction. The health benefits of human-animal interaction has been also been studied in clinical patients and the findings are contradictory. The Scheffé test showed that male cat-lovers were higher and all pet-lovers were lower in autonomy, that male pet- and dog-lovers were higher and female cat-lovers were lower in dominance, that female pet-lovers were higher and all cat-lovers were lower in nurturance, and that male dog-lovers were higher and female dog- and cat-lovers were lower in aggression. The results showed that petting a toy animal was not significantly better than petting no animal at reducing anxiety; however, petting a real animal did significantly reduce anxiety. And still other studies have found no link between pet owners and health outcomes [10]. Most problematic, these studies use convenience samples that may not be representative of the general population, examine a narrow range of outcome variables, and use cross sectional designs that do not consider long-term health outcomes. His method identifies analytic groups that are precisely matched on all known covariates to identify subsets of similar people and reduce/eliminate the selection bias in analyses. For example, dog owners differ from non-dog owners, according to research conducted in Ireland [28]. Dog owners were also more likely to also own a cat. Additionally, the General Health measure is higher; average BMI is lower; but the rates of asthma are higher. No, Is the Subject Area "Pets and companion animals" applicable to this article? Patients who owned a dog had a much higher rate of one year survival– 6% of dog owning patients did not survive their first year, compared to 28% of non-dog owning patients. here. The extent to which these studies of the therapeutic environment can be generalized to the presence of pets in the home, and of public health outcomes is somewhat dubious. They may enjoy the freedom to make their own decisions and choices independently of a team or social group. This demonstrates that when the impact of pet ownership is isolated from other related variables that also impact health, the relationship was appears to be diminished (although the authors do not specifically test whether the difference in effect sizes is statistically significant). The effect size of the association between pet ownership and doctor visits was reduced after matching across 11 variables—the mean difference between the groups was reduced from .44 visits to .28 visits after selection bias was taken into account. A number lower than 1 means that this characteristic is related to a lower odds of pet ownership, e.g., Hispanic OR = .37, meaning Hispanics are 63% less likely to own a dog compared all other race/ethnicity categories. Therefore, it is possible that some of the positive associations between health and dog ownership found in studies that did not adjust for income could be over- or underestimated due to selection bias. This literature suggests that health varies as a function of a number of sociodemographic factors including age, gender, race, income, education, marital status, employment, and housing. Previous research suggests that pet owners are psychologically different than non-owners in terms of self-esteem and other personality characteristics. In 2018, Mars Petcare conducted a survey of 1000 cat owners and 1000 dog owners and found some unique distinctions between the two groups. Personality Differences Between Dog and Cat Owners. Interviews were conducted in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean. Of these, 26.2% of respondents owned a dog, 21.5% owned a cat, and 8.5% owned both a dog and cat (these categories overlap). When health-related respondent characteristics were added to the model, all previously observed associations remained and, similar to results above, respondents with current asthma were more likely to own a dog and cat while BMI, and general health were not associated with pet ownership in the adjusted models, see Table 4. In other words, factors that contribute to selecting to have a dog could themselves have health impacts that could be mistakenly attributed to dog ownership. Household income was not associated with ownership in the adjusted model, see Table 3. PLoS ONE 12(6): Two theories exist regarding the effects of social support—the ‘main effect’ hypothesis suggests that the beneficial effects are diffuse, the ‘buffering’ hypothesis suggests that social support effects are notable only in the presence of stressors. In our analyses, it appears that it may inflate them, as pet owner characteristics are associated with better mental and physical health outcomes. In this study, 82 pet owners and 48 non-owners were tested on self-esteem, extraversion, neuroticism, and social self-esteem. This benefit may extend to children as well; research found that the odds of being overweight were lower for any young children who lived in a dog owning household [13]. The RAND Human Subjects Protection Board reviewed and approved the research for the use of secondary data without any personal identifiers. Affiliation Now, a Mars Petcare survey of 1,000 dog owners vs. 1,000 cat owners is providing more concrete proof as to the differences between cat and dog people. The current research is cross-sectional, and as a result, caution should be taken in interpreting the reported associations. About one quarter of the sample reported living with a dog, one quarter reported living with a cat, and 8.5% lived with both a dog and a cat. e0179494. There are key limitations common to this body of work that prevent causal links between human animal interaction and health outcomes, even when associations are found. Detailed information about the CHIS methodology is available elsewhere [32, 33], the survey is available online at http://healthpolicy.ucla.edu/chis/design/Documents/CHIS2003_adult_q.pdf, and the data used for these analysis can be accessed at http://healthpolicy.ucla.edu/chis/data/Pages/GetCHISData.aspx under “Public Use Data Files” with the data file name“CHIS 2003 Adult”. In addition, while the odds of owning a dog are higher for respondents with a higher BMI, the magnitude of this effect is very small with an OR = 1.006. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179494.t004. For example, there is a strong inverse relationship between social class and health [39], and it has been estimated that poverty accounts for 6% of mortality in the US [40]. The mental health benefits of interacting with animals outside the therapeutic environment have been studied less—in part because of the difficulties of carrying out methodologically rigorous research outside the controlled environment of therapy. Research investigating pet owners’ personalities has tended to focus on the relationship between personality and pet preference or attachment style, or the complementarity of owner and pet personality and associated owner satisfaction [90–94]. This is not a new problem, as selection issues have plagued observational research, with many methodologists and statisticians advancing new methods to deal with this problem that used to confound any meaningful analysis. There is a modest but growing research literature examining the health impact of human animal interaction, which is largely inconclusive due to contradictory findings and methodological weaknesses [3]. Overall, pet owners are more likely to be: single females or married, younger, White, live in more rural areas, live in homes, and belong to households where everyone is employed full time. In other words, can we trust research that examines pet owners and non-pet owners and then tries to make causal attributions about differences in health? A second experiment, involving 56 dog owners (91 percent of whom were women, with a mean age of 42 and average annual family income of $65,000), examined whether pet owners benefit more when their pet is perceived to fulfill their social needs better. No, Is the Subject Area "Cats" applicable to this article? The owners were also asked to complete an assessment of their key personality traits--including the ones psychologists call the "Big Five:" openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Copyright: © 2017 Saunders et al. We do know that pet ownership cannot change some biological variables, such as gender, age, and race; but it is plausible that pet ownership may influence other variables, including health-related characteristics. One research line has focused on how pet ownership may improve the physical health of owners. No, PLOS is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation, #C2354500, based in San Francisco, California, US, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179494, http://healthpolicy.ucla.edu/chis/data/Pages/overview.aspx, https://www.nichd.nih.gov/about/org/der/branches/cdbb/programs/psad/HAI/Pages/overview.aspx, http://healthpolicy.ucla.edu/chis/design/Documents/CHIS2003_adult_q.pdf, http://healthpolicy.ucla.edu/chis/data/Pages/GetCHISData.aspx. that pet owners and non-pet owners differ across many traits, including gender, age, race/ ethnicity, living arrangements, and income. ;o¾ÜÁ �ğ¶æ‰èŒT¿ÅĞò�q‚ø©¡•o:�-6�Î2î/ì‘]8»~Ši æ½wŸXɉêª?ĞàÂwöŸJº`âlÅêLkIª‚@EjY×…q¯5Ú§HòtÜÇv´cÖ6i ¤å’Á¬�0MÀ]Y¦³UÿôN;İM]ŠÅ¥‘0¯ù]z¼íß÷Ö[{Æs¬1uO[6ïËbÄeÁÊ#¦9Ãkè°~dş�/ÏîYøï›pMAõ.=Œë¤�P\|ªW#?şW$izÂóğ8ï1¥ô¶ZL âÒ¢÷r³i^³�õÖäô˜?WP]â±ãö‘±µ–X A.è@ı çûŠ‹ÉÖz[© ú¯75Ùñy§ãêì6œïŠ›k .ŞU*ı³3}�hA\ô“t& �’¸§ÆHóìåW!™QœÕ =ï+ÌĞĞ“­ A 5, Jessica Saunders, Layla Parast, Susan H. Babey, Jeremy V. Miles, Exploring the differences between pet and non-pet owners: Implications for human-animal interaction research and policy. Introverts do not like going out so often, and they feel it as a burden; thus, they do not like owning a dog and prefer a cat instead. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179494.t002. While the published scholarly studies do not provide strong support for a link between pet ownership and health, some evidence does points in that direction, and researchers are calling for stronger methodological studies [3]. Most dog owners exercise their dogs, and although not the primary aim, exercising one’s dog also usually involves exercising oneself. Several studies have found that owning and/or interacting with a pet (mostly a dog) has benefits for the individual, including mental health outcomes such as decreased anxiety, and physical health outcomes such as improved immune response and physical activity [4–8]. Approximately sixty-two percent of the American population live with a pet [1], and it is generally believed that these pets provide mental and physical health benefits to their human companions [2]. While each of these quasi-experimental methods can help reduce selection bias, they also require careful consideration for proper identification of instruments, cutoffs, and covariates. Using non clinical populations, there is more compelling evidence that pet owners may be healthier. No, Is the Subject Area "Mental health and psychiatry" applicable to this article? CHIS collected extensive information on health status, health conditions, health-related behaviors, health insurance coverage and access to health care services as well as demographic and socioeconomic information. Discover a faster, simpler path to publishing in a high-quality journal. These multivariate results also show that lower odds of owning a cat are associated with older age and non-white race. Most of the cat owners are introverts and sensitive. The researchers randomly assigned participants to one of five groups: they were asked to pet a rabbit, a turtle, a toy rabbit, a toy turtle, or they were assigned to a control group. Yes In other words, pet owners might be different to begin with. Again, we cannot make any claims about the direction of the relationship and do not know if cat ownership causes asthma, respondents with asthma were more likely to own cats, or something related to both asthma and cat ownership is behind the relationship. We further examine the relationship between ownership and each of these characteristics using survey-weighted logistic regression models in the next sections. Our goals for this paper are twofold: (1) Describe how pet owners and non-pet owners differ. For example, do pets promote health through companionship and emotional support; do they encourage healthy behavior; or is there something else about them that could improve mental or physical health? Overall, they estimated the treatment effect of pet ownership resulted in a 24% reduction in annual doctor visits. broad scope, and wide readership – a perfect fit for your research every time. In terms of health differences—which should not be considered to be outcomes or predictors of ownership because our study is purely correlational—pet owners were more likely to have asthma, and dog owners were more likely to have higher BMIs; but otherwise, there were no differences between pet and non-pet owners in general health and BMI. Table 2 shows the odds ratio of each characteristic being associated with the different categories of pet ownership using survey weights, meaning that we can conclude that when there is a significant difference (p < .05), there is a difference between dog owners and non-dog owners in terms of this characteristic. We briefly review the research evidence, including the hypothesized mechanisms through which pet ownership may influence health outcomes. There is conflicting evidence about whether living with pets results in better mental and physical health outcomes, with the majority of the empirical research evidence being inconclusive due to methodological limitations. Yes Gosling (2007) showed that dog owners were found to be less neurotic than cat people and scored lower on openness. In other words, pet owners might be different to begin with. Pet lifestyle, or psychographic, segmentation is a powerful strategy that moves beyond differences between pet owners and non-pet owners and between dog versus cat owners to segmenting U.S. pet owners into meaningful groups based on their attachment to, attitudes toward and … In one of the most methodologically sophisticated studies examining this phenomenon, Headey and Grabka [27] employed propensity score matching to ensure, as far as possible, equivalence in owners and non-owners in Germany. The socio-demographic differences between pet and non-pet owners are not trivial, especially when examining different mental, emotional, and physical health differences across groups—there is a large research literature demonstrating the important role of many of these socio-demographic factors as determinants of health [34–38]. Indeed, this is exactly what was identified in previous research—once differences in predictors were accounted for, the relationship between pet ownership and doctor visits shrank to half its size [27]. For example, researchers have found that owners scored higher Given the cross-sectional nature of this sample, it is impossible to make causal interpretations from any observed associations. Allen, Blascovich, and Mendes [15] tested the buffering hypothesis by subjecting individuals to stressful situations, examining the effects of social support from pet cats, dogs, spouses and friends. We include a discussion about how the factors associated with the selection into the pet ownership group are related to a range of mental and physical health outcomes. The average household size was 3.3 with a minimum household size of 1 and maximum of 18, 55.9% of respondents owned a home, 66% lived in a house, 56.6% worked full time and 32.2% of respondents had a full-time employed spouse. We include a … https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179494, Editor: Meghan Byrne, Public Library of Science, UNITED STATES, Received: November 4, 2015; Accepted: May 31, 2017; Published: June 23, 2017. Understanding these mechanisms is vital for understanding how pets might impact health so that we can translate findings into broader public health policy. The weights created using boosted regression provide the estimated conditional odds of receiving treatment where Xi is the vector of control variables and p(Xi) is the estimated conditional probability of receiving treatment for an individual with control variables equal to Xi. It should be noted that the sample size was small (58 individuals), focused on a limited set of proximal outcomes, which may not translate into public health outcomes. For example, adjusting for all other characteristics, the odds of owning a dog for a respondent who owned a home were 1.56 times the odds for a respondent who did not own a home; the odds of owning a dog for a respondent who lived in a house were 2.5 times the odds for a respondent who did not live in house. For example, there is ample evidence that socioeconomic status is related to a number of health outcomes [37–39, 41]. Is the Subject Area "Dogs" applicable to this article? Openness of Cold-Blooded Exotic Pet Owners In multivariate models, several respondent characteristics remained associated with dog ownership. We add another note of caution about the causal direction of the effect of pet ownership on health when using cross-sectional data—deciding whether certain health and/or health-related characteristics should be included in the selection model will be extremely important since the directionality of the cause and effect could go in either direction for some variables (e.g., someone who is not physically active does not adopt a dog vs. someone is less physically active because they do not have a dog). All analyses presented in this paper are weighted using the CHIS survey weights which appropriately account for the sample design, nonresponse, and representativeness. This study represents the most rigorous causal test of pet ownership on overall health, using doctor visits as a proxy. Yes In terms of health differences—which should not be considered to be outcomes or predictors of ownership because our study is purely correlational—pet owners were more likely to have asthma, and dog owners were more likely to have higher BMIs; but otherwise, there were no differences between pet and non-pet owners in general health and BMI. Several authors have reported significant individual differences between the two cohorts, with pet owners being more sociable (Joubert, 1987), self-sufficient (Kidd & Feldman, 1981), socially sensitive (Hyde, Kurdek, & Larson, 1983), psychotic (Parslow, Jorm, Christensen, Rodgers, & Jacomb, 2005), less neurotic (Paden-Levy, 1985) and less independent (Guttmann, 1981) than non-owners. The sample statistics give a picture of how pet and non-pet owners are similar and different. Many people correlate being a pet owner with having a higher well being. In this paper, we will examine the factors associated with pet ownership to provide empirical evidence about how dog and cat owners differ from the general population. Yes In comparison, cat people were generally about 12 percent more neurotic ; however, they were also 11 percent more open than dog people. For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click Although some researchers have incorporated animal preference into their investigations of pet ownership, such research is scarce and inconclusive. Most of the research on pet ownership and health outcomes compares pet owners with non-pet owners, but is this an appropriate comparison to make? With respect to cat ownership, Table 2 shows similar univariate associations with the odds of owning a cat as seen with dog ownership, with the exception that female single respondents had a higher odds of owning a cat (rather than lower), age was not associated with cat ownership, and higher BMI and larger household size were associated with lower odds of owning a cat. (2) Describe why this difference needs to be accounted for in observational research on pet ownership and health. Furthermore some of the Cohens’s d effect sizes for the differences between the two populations were medium (d = 0.5) or almost large (d = 0.8). All the research to date suffers from several limitations that prevent any strong conclusions about the health effects of pet ownership from being made. METHODOLOGY Research Framework and Sample Research frame of this study is shown as figure 1. Although some pet owners and non-owners might fit these stereotypes, studies have failed to confirm them for most. On the flip side, pet owners are sometimes pegged as socially awkward, excessively shy or downright antisocial, preferring animals to people. We use a large, population-based survey from California administered in 2003 (n = 42,044) and find that pet owners and non-pet owners differ across many traits, including gender, age, race/ethnicity, living arrangements, and income.

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