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Having Dogs Provide Health Benefits

As well as being your best friend, dogs may also be good for your health. A study co-authored by University of Victoria researchers published this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine concludes that dog ownership nearly doubles the amount of time spent taking healthy walks. While walking his own dog, exercise psychologist Dr. Ryan Rhodes wondered if dog owners were more motivated to get out and walk and if they benefited from time with their pooch. Rhodes and physical education master’s student Shane Brown surveyed 177 men and 174 women between age 20 and 80 in Greater Victoria. They found that the 70 dog owners walked an average of 300 minutes a week compared to 168 minutes a week for the others.
“There’s this extra dog obligation that helps get people up and out for their exercise,” says Brown. Other than walking, the dog owners in this study actually got less overall exercise than people without dogs, suggesting that when dog owners go for walks, they do it partly because they choose to be active with their pets.
Neither the sex of the owner nor the size of the dog made a difference: men and women who owned dogs participated in increased amounts of moderate exercise compared with those who had no dog.
Despite the findings, Brown said he’s certainly not recommending people get a dog just to help them get exercise. “We're definitely not saying, ‘Everyone go out and get a dog.’ We are saying that for those of us who have dogs, or those who are thinking of getting a dog, this is an added benefit.”
Rhodes’ and Brown’s study was supported with funding from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Study claims dogs and their owners look alike

Long the subject of speculation, a new study says that dogs DO resemble their owners. At least this is the case with purebred canines, according to new research conducted at the University of California, San Diego, by social psychologist Nicholas Christenfeld and his UCSD colleague, Michael Roy. The full study, Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners?, appears in the May issue of Psychological Science, the journal of the American Psychological Society that focuses on empirical research in psychology.

The UCSD psychologists found that when people pick a dog, "they seek one that, at some level, resembles them, and, when they get a purebred, they get what they want."

Forty-five dogs and their owners were separately photographed and judges were shown pictures of an owner, that owner’s dog, and one other dog, with the task of picking out the true match. The proof of resemblance was that a majority of the purebred dogs and their owners could be identified by the 28 judges called upon to examine the photographs, with the results showing 16 matches out of the 25 purebreds. There was no evidence of resemblance between the mixed breed dogs and their owners.