11 ways your dog may have changed your life without you realizing it
200 is about how many extra minutes of walking a week people with dogs do compared with neighbors without one, according to a University of Liverpool study.
That’s the first of 11 things on this list. Each has a named researcher and a study you can look up. Most show an association, not proof that the dog caused it, and we say so each time.
200 minutes
Carri Westgarth of the University of Liverpool studied 385 households in West Cheshire, England. Dog owners spent close to 300 minutes a week walking with their dogs. People without dogs walked about 200 minutes less.
Dog owners were four times more likely to meet the recommended 150 minutes of weekly activity. And the dog walks didn’t replace other exercise. They came on top.
You know your neighbors’ names
Lisa Wood at the University of Western Australia surveyed about 2,700 people in Perth, San Diego, Portland, and Nashville. Pet owners were significantly more likely than non-owners to get to know people in their neighborhood.
Wood reported that among dog owners, 60 percent said they knew their neighbors better. Even pets that stayed in the backyard worked as ice-breakers.
A look that goes both ways
Miho Nagasawa of Azabu University in Japan had 30 owners spend half an hour with their dogs, then tested urine from both. National Geographic reported that the more a dog gazed at its owner, the more oxytocin rose in both the owner and the dog.
Hand-raised wolves didn’t make that eye contact, and their owners’ oxytocin didn’t budge. The 2015 paper in Science called it an oxytocin-gaze loop.
Ten minutes
Patricia Pendry of Washington State University randomly assigned 249 students to four groups. The group that spent 10 minutes petting cats and dogs had a significant drop in cortisol, a major stress hormone.
Your office, with a dog in it
Randolph Barker’s team at Virginia Commonwealth University followed 75 employees at a Greensboro, North Carolina, company that allows dogs. By the end of the day, stress fell for workers whose dogs were there. It rose for people without dogs, and for owners who left theirs at home.
It’s a small study, and it relied on self-reported stress. The researchers were avowed dog lovers, NPR noted.
The bed question
Lois Krahn, a sleep specialist at Mayo Clinic’s Arizona campus, tracked 40 adults and their dogs for a week. People with a dog in the room had about 83 percent sleep efficiency. With the dog on the bed, it was about 80. Both count as satisfactory.
“As long as the dogs were not on the bed,” Krahn said, it wasn’t a big issue.
After the heart attack
Mwenya Mubanga and Tove Fall of Uppsala University used Swedish registries covering 3.4 million people. Among heart attack survivors who lived alone, dog owners had a 33 percent lower risk of dying afterward.
“Social isolation is a strong risk factor,” Fall said, per the American Heart Association. The researchers say more work is needed to show cause.
Getting older
Yu Taniguchi followed 11,233 Japanese adults aged 65 to 84. Current dog owners were about half as likely to develop a disability as people who had never owned one, per PLOS ONE. Owners who exercised regularly did even better.
A 2024 follow-up found a 40 percent lower risk of disabling dementia.
A calmer kid
Anne Gadomski at Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, New York, screened 643 children at check-ups. Twelve percent of children with a pet dog flagged for anxiety, compared with 21 percent without one, per the CDC’s journal.
It shows an association only. It doesn’t prove the dog caused it.
Fewer wheezes
Fall’s team, working with more than a million Swedish children, found that kids who had a dog in their first year of life were 13 percent less likely to have asthma by age six, NBC reported. They noted it doesn’t prove cause.
The same data also showed slightly more pneumonia in preschoolers exposed to dogs.
Microbes you swapped
Se Jin Song and Rob Knight sampled 60 families. Dog ownership significantly increased the skin microbes adults cohabiting with dogs shared, and dog owners shared more with their own dog than with other dogs.
Knight called the strength of the owner-pet link one of the study’s biggest surprises.
The bottom line
Westgarth’s team found dog owners walked about 200 more minutes a week. Tove Fall’s Swedish records covered 3.4 million adults and more than a million children.
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