The staff at Pine Creek Veterinary Clinic in Nevada City includes, from left, Callie Hastings, Tiffany Kesler, Melinda Dudley, Dr. Denny Nolet, Tim Vintere and Ajay Matta.
Our pets are good for us. We know it instinctively, but science bears that out. Even our brains have evolved to embrace our long relationship with animal companions. But our love for them also reveals a dark side of us: Human relationships can be so fraught that we sometimes prefer the unconditional love of our cats, dogs, birds and horses.
That bond between humans and animals glowed from the examination room inside Pine Creek Veterinary Clinic
in Nevada City. While a technician tended a blind, elderly Chihuahua mix, Dr. Denny Nolet comforted the little dog’s distraught human. With worried tears and laughter, the dog’s owner showed a video of her companion in a playful moment. Nolet nodded knowingly.
At a deep place, every animal that comes through Nolet’s door is Rocky, the cocker spaniel he loved as a boy. One day when his mother was away, a much larger dog attacked the pet. “Rocky died,” Nolet recalls. “I wished I could have done something for Rocky to save him. That was my first thought about becoming a vet, so I could do something for animals.”
Benefits and Pushing the Envelope
Studies link pet ownership to lower blood pressure, cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Pet owners report less loneliness and depression; and they have more opportunities for exercise, social interaction and time outdoors, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
In the last decade, that science has changed attitudes about integrating animals into broader areas of daily human life.
At a Grass Valley skilled nursing facility, a Labrador retriever wearing a brown cloth jacket pads from room to room. Residents reach out their hands from beds and wheelchairs to get a wet nuzzle. At a regional university, squeals of joy ring out when students discover a little pack of trained service dogs, brought in by volunteers. At another university, therapy dogs come to campus during final exams to ease student anxiety.
My job has not so much to do with the animals and everything to do with the people.
Veterinarian Mace Dekker
The circle has widened to include “companion animals” – pets not specially trained as service animals, but which their owners claim offer psychological or emotional comfort. They show up almost everywhere: Small dogs peer out from the child seat in local grocery stores. On Sunday mornings, a local pastor blesses canine companions during Holy Communion.
Specialized companion animals are protected under the Americans for Disabilities Act and federal housing laws, according to Regina Schoenfeld- Tacher, et al., writing in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, June 2017. Most people they surveyed largely supported such companionship, although they often didn’t understand the various categories of specialization.
But the elevation of animals in human settings butts up against health codes and can cause friction for people with allergies. At least one local grocery store has posted a warning that only trained service animals – which typically wear a vest labeling them as such – may enter. Law firms specialize in helping people draw the distinction between a legitimate service animal and one whose human is pushing the envelope.
Loss, Validation and Conflict
The human-animal bond also can be measured by the grief one feels when the animal companion dies. Researchers B. S. Sharkin and D. Knox urged psychologists “to understand how significant pets can be in the lives of their clients and to be sensitive to clients’ grief in response to the death of a pet,” in Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, in 2003.
One theory behind the human-animal bond suggests pets help us feel validated because they offer unconditional love.
Validation “means that we derive psychological comfort and satisfaction from being perceived positively by others, and especially, from being perceived the way we perceive ourselves,” writes Dr. Martin Siegel, a veterinarian writing in Kosmos in 2015. “In human relationships, even the deepest love is ‘conditional’ … with the possible exception of parental love for children.”
But our animals?
“Once we have an established bond with our pets, they continue to love us regardless of any personal flaws that might cause other people to stop loving us,” Siegel continues.
Dr. Mace Dekker, of Grass Valley Veterinary Hospital, has seen attitudes toward animal companionship shift dramatically during his 21 years in practice. Elderly people often live alone, and their children may visit little, he observes. “People are disconnected. There’s a need to fill that void in us, to look for connection,” Dekker says. “The less we can find that in people, the more we seek it in the animals around us.”
Yet, the psychological role our pets play stands in contrast to our attitudes toward non-pet creatures. Take chickens, for example. “Society values low-priced eggs and tolerates the conditions of battery-cage rearing in North America, but simultaneously abhors the presence of puppy mills,” notes Amanda I. Reinisch in the Canadian Veterinary Journal, July 2009.
DNA Suggests Long Canine Bond
Such values may be as basic as our DNA.
Of all our pets, Americans have more cats than any other pet species, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. But we go back farthest in time with our dogs. Scientists pinpoint the human-canine relationship starting about 100,000 years ago, when the genes of wolves and domestic dogs started to diverge. They theorize that wolves with naturally friendlier personalities first crossed the species barrier. Since then, humans have continued to breed those wolves’ descendants for qualities that please us, including sweetness, playfulness and large eyes.
“We may have evolutionary tendencies to derive comfort from being around other living things,” writes Siegel. That becomes a kind of feedback loop, he suggests: “We have bred into our pets the very characteristics that make them most appealing to us.”
Another researcher offers a dog’s-eye view: Animals became pets by figuring out that we love taking care of them, the way a parent cares for a child, suggests research psychologist John Archer of the University of Central Lancashire, England, in Evolution and Human Behavior, July 1997.
Along the way, dogs’ brains have grown smaller than wolves’, losing mass in the areas that deal with learning and understanding, according to Colin Groves of Australian National University, Canberra (cited by Archer). Human brains also grew smaller in the regions devoted to hearing and smell – likely the result of our dependence on dogs for those keener senses.
But, surprisingly, human brains have shrunk less than dog brains over the eons, “suggesting that dogs got more out of the deal than we did,” writes Dr. Nigel Barber in Psychology Today, April 2009.
Yet, we get enough out of it that about 60 percent of American households have some kind of pet, according to a 2006 Gallup poll – despite the cost and the work on our end.
That’s because “the role of animals has shifted,” Dekker says. “They used to guard property and hunt rats. That has shifted to a pure companionship role.”
Love, Isolation and $$$
Our many-layered relationships with our animal friends create a complex environment for veterinarians.
Dekker has a clear understanding of his role: While doctoring animals, he really is ministering to the human heart.
“When I was working in the (San Francisco) Bay Area, I had a two-year-old rat come in with a prolapsed uterus,” Dekker recalls. The condition required emergency care. He told the man who brought in the creature that correcting the condition would cost $1,000.
“To my surprise, he said ‘yes.’” Dekker says. The surgery was successful. Six months later, the rat died of natural causes at a ripe old rat-age. “He called me to say, ‘Thank you. I had six months more with the rat,’” Dekker concludes. “He was lonely.”
Such strong love suggests something fragile about our ability to relate to each other: “social isolation,” Dekker calls it. “I’ve seen people spend $50,000 to $70,000” as they seek healing for their animal companions, he says. “I’ve seen people take a second mortgage on their homes.”
That complex relationship translates into a multi-billion- dollar industry that has expanded to include pet medical insurance and cemeteries. Employers are starting to recognize the human-animal bond, too. “Some 5,000 companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Xerox and Hewlett-Packard, now offer pet insurance… in an effort to lure talent,” writes Susan Jenks of the New York Times, June 2017.
Nationally, we spent nearly $16.4 billion on veterinary care just for our dogs in 2012, according to a survey by the American Veterinary Medical Association.
These figures offer, perhaps, the clearest sign that we put our money where our hearts are.
“My job has not so much to do with the animals and everything to do with the people,” Dekker says.
Contact freelance writer Trina Kleist at tkleistwrites@gmail.com or (530) 575-6132
