Canine Ownership Benefits

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The benefits of canine ownership are many and varied. Owning a dog can be beneficial to an individual’s health, emotional well-being and also provide social benefits and there are many articles, reports, and studies to support this, including scientific and medical research.
Owning a dog can have many mental and physical health benefits. There has been quite a bit of research in recent years about the physical health benefits including the ability of dogs to detect certain types of illnesses using their sense of smell. Dogs have an acute sense of smell that is far better than that of humans. In fact, a dog has between one hundred and twenty five to three hundred million scent glands as compared to just around five million in an adult human. …show more content…

There is some definite truth to the old saying that laughter is the best medicine. It certainly has benefits for peoples mental and emotional well-being. A 2006 report by Robin Maria Valeri (Valeri, 2006), entitled Tails of Laughter, illustrates how laughter can positively impact relationships between two people and suggests that there is a strong social component to laughter . The study was conducted to examine the daily relationship between pet ownership and laughter. In the study 95 individuals, who were divided into four groups, dog owners, cat owners, those who owned both, and those who owned neither a cat nor a dog. The participants, for one day, kept a laughter log where they recorded the frequency and source of their laughter throughout that day. The results showed that the most frequent source of laughter was spontaneous resulting from a situation or incident involving a pet. Individuals who owned both a cat and dog reported the highest amount of laughter with those who owned just dogs coming in second. Those who owned just a cat or no pet at all reported the least amount of laughter. Jennifer Welsh, a staff writer for LiveScience, (Welsh, 2011) talks about the emotional and social support that dogs can give their owners in her article Puppy Love: Owners are happier, healthier. She references a statement by a University of Ohio researcher that pet owners had greater self-esteem, were more conscientious, tended to be more physically fit and less lonely, and that they more extroverted and were less likely to be fearful. In the study they surveyed 217 people to determine the differences between those who did and did not own pets. They concluded that those who owned pets were happier, healthier and better adjusted than those who did not own a pet. In the second part of the

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