Pet Ownership, Attitudes, and Experiences across Income Levels
Having a pet can be a wonderful experience. They can provide comfort, companionship, security, and help with everyday living. Indeed, positive outcomes associated with pets generally have been documented in physical (e.g. physiological indicators, allergies, cardiovascular benefits, exercise, school attendance, and motor skills) mental (e.g. caring, empathy, happiness, comfort, stress relief) and social (e.g. social integration, number of friends, and meeting strangers) realms (Barlow, Hutchinson, Newton, Grover, Ward, 2012; Beetz et al. 2011; Endenburg van Lith, 2011; Esposito, McCune, Griffin, Maholmes, 2011, McConnell, Brown, Shoda, Stayton, Martin, 2011; McNichols et al. 2005; Nagasawa, Mogi, Kikusui, 2009; NIH, 2009; Peacock, Chur Hansen, Winefield, 2012) Pets may be especially beneficial, even therapeutic, with respect to children, especially those with issues that may be stress and trauma related, and pet therapy is often encouraged in these situations (Van Houtte Jarvis, 1995) Taken together, there is a substantial amount of evidence supporting what has been termed the "pet effect" (Smith, 2012) and the notion that pets truly are "friend[s] with benefits" (McConnell, et al. 2011) Nevertheless, pets may not be for everyone. Thirty percent of homes in the U.S. do not have pets (American Pet Products Association, 2013) The time, space, and economic resources required for pets may make them unaffordable to many (see Herzog, 2011) There are also people who simply dislike or are afraid of animals, are allergic to them, or have had costly, harrowing, or violent experiences with them (CDC, 2009, Peacock, et al, 2012) Indeed, for whatever reason, there are many people who do not have pets yet are still quite happy and healthy. Because of this, many have suggested that automatic acceptance of the notion of a pet effect is unwarranted because there are likely caveats or conditions that affect its generalizability. Others have gone farther and have questioned the notion in the first place, arguing that the evidence base for it is actually inconclusive because of the nature of the research, in that it is based primarily on anecdotal accounts, cross sectional (i.e. correlational) studies, and biased or small samples (Esposito et al. 2011; Herzog, 2011, Mueller, 2014) Replication is thus difficult (Smith, 2012) True experiments using random assignment into pet owner and not a pet owner groups and perhaps controlling for confounding variables are difficult to conduct as well and are missing (NIH, 2009) A potential income confound, in particular, with respect to pet research has been noted (Herzog, 2011; McConnell et al. 2011) as an income gradient has been documented for a multitude of health outcomes (Adler Kawachi, 2007; Marmot, 2004) That is, those with higher incomes, and thus better health, may be more likely to acquire pets, so pets may not cause good health. Income might be related to the type of pet acquired as well. The wealthy or healthy may have different types or breeds of pets than their middle and lower income counterparts or those who are in relatively poorer health. Dogs, for instance, may function more as protectors in some settings (e.g. high crime areas) and more as companions in others (low crime areas) and because of that, some types may be more prevalent depending on the community setting. Pets may also be treated differently in different settings and thus the dynamics with respect to human pet relations (i.e. the role of pets may shift from one of pleasing the many to one of pleasing the few) may be different. One could envision a tragedy of the commons scenario playing out in some communities, for instance, where pet owners, particularly dog owners, benefit at the individual level in terms of safety to some degree by having a very protective and thus potentially aggressive dog, but the community as a whole may suffer in other ways if everyone has such a dog (e.