Having a cat or dog as a pet can improve feelings of well-being just as much as marriage or seeing friends and family regularly, new research suggests, CNN reports.
The study, published March 31 in the journal Social Indicators Research, concludes that “having an animal companion” can be worth up to about $90.000 a year in terms of life satisfaction – a measure economists use to quantify the implicit cost of otherwise immeasurable things.
According to the researchers, that figure is roughly equal to the theoretical increase in income you would have if you were married or saw friends and family members regularly, comparing the results with other studies that used the same statistical method, N1 reports.
The results surprised even the researchers themselves. "When I first got those numbers, I was surprised; I thought that was a lot of money even for me, who loves (pets)," said Adelina Gschwandner, professor of economics at the University of Kent and co-author of the study.
Then she thought, "Most people claim that their pets are like friends or family members, so it's comparable," she told CNN.
"If pets are truly like friends and family, why couldn't that measure be compared to talking to friends and family once a week? A pet is there every day."
While the mental and physical benefits of owning a dog are particularly well-known, there is still debate among scientists about the overall impact of pets on the well-being of their owners.
“It’s a little more complicated than people think,” says Megan Mueller, an associate professor at Tufts University who studies the relationship between humans and animals but was not involved in this research.
"Many of us see our pets as contributing to life satisfaction, but depending on how this is measured in research, the results can be different," she told CNN, adding that she was not familiar with the specific statistical analysis Gschwandner used.
In their study, Gschwandner and co-author Michael Gmeiner, an assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics, used data from a long-term survey covering 2.500 British households.
Instead of simply comparing life satisfaction and pet ownership, which would only show a correlation, economists attempted to prove a cause-and-effect relationship.
To do this, they used a complex statistical method known as the instrumental variable approach. This method works by finding “a third variable that is related to… in our case, pets, but is not related to life satisfaction,” Gschwandner explained.
"What that variable is trying to capture are potential omitted variables, as well as potential reverse causality."
For example, the authors state: "It is possible that happy and healthy people decide to get a pet, rather than that pets make people happy and healthy." So in their study, they used survey data on personality types, as well as pet ownership and life satisfaction, to control for this factor.
If pets really do improve life satisfaction to the extent that research suggests, Gschwandner urged policymakers to make it easier for people to own them.
However, Mueller warned against "over-anthropomorphizing pets" and equating our relationships with them with the relationships we have with other people.
“There are certain similarities,” she said. “We know that social and emotional support are key aspects of human-pet relationships, just as we get in relationships with other people… While animals are strongly connected to us, they are not the same as humans.”
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