When Life Gets Tough

Pets

Research has shown that owning a pet can reduce stress; petting a dog, for instance, has been shown to lower blood pressure. A study at City Hospital in New York heart patients who owned pets were significantly more likely to be alive a year after they were discharged from the hospital than those who didn’t own pets. The presence of a pet was found to give higher boost to the survival rate than having a spouse or friends. A study conducted at UCLA found that dog owners required much less medical care for stress-induced aches and pains than non-dog owners. Pet ownership may affect people physiologically through the soothing and relaxing effect of touch. And speechless communication with a pet, or simply watching a cat or fish, may produce a relaxation response with little demand on the viewer. Pets such as dogs and cats provide unconditional, nonjudgmental love and affection. And pets enlarge our focus beyond ourselves and connect us to a larger world. They also make us laugh more. (See www.holistic-online.com/stress/stress_pet-therapy.htm; www.dog-play.com)

Children see animals as peers, and older children’s empathy with animals can carry over into their experiences of people.

The Sussex County LPN Program (www.dog-play.com/dogpill.html) provides this information in a “pharmacology worksheet format”: Pets can: stimulate spontaneous performance of active ROM exercises, especially of the hand; relax pre-existing contractures due to arthritis; increase motivation to get out of bed in the morning; decreases blood pressure; contributes to survival rate post-MI; decreases risk of the “helplessness/hopelessness” syndrome associated with illness and vulnerability to sudden death accidents; can increase awareness in cognitively impaired; stimulates social interaction.

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