Pet Ownership Quiz

Pet Ownership: Health Benefits, Risks, and Popularity

• A pet is an animal kept primarily for companionship or entertainment rather than as a working animal, livestock, or laboratory animal.

• Dogs and cats are the most popular pets, followed by rabbits, birds, reptiles, and small mammals.

• Pets provide physical and emotional benefits to their owners, including exercise, social interaction, and companionship.

• Pet therapy is a medically approved practice that utilizes trained animals and handlers to achieve specific physical, social, cognitive, or emotional goals with patients.

• Pets are mainly acquired for companionship, to protect a home or property, or for their perceived beauty or attractiveness.

• The global pet industry has grown significantly, with China owning the most pets and Italy having an estimated 45 million pets.

• Keeping pets can be detrimental to their health if certain requirements are not met, such as inappropriate feeding, exposure to toxic substances, and lack of exercise.

• Pets are believed to bring mental and physical health benefits to their owners, including decreased stress and lower blood pressure.

• Pets can also facilitate social interaction and community connection for their owners, particularly for the elderly and homeless populations.

• Legislation regarding pet ownership varies by country and region, with some countries having laws to promote the welfare of pets and ensure minimum standards for their treatment and protection.

• Pets have a considerable environmental impact, particularly in countries with high pet densities, and pet ownership in the US has considerable environmental costs.

• Domesticated pets are most common and include dogs, cats, small mammals, birds, and fish, while some wild animals are kept as pets, such as tigers, despite being illegal.A Brief History of Pet Keeping

• Wild animals are kept as pets, but generally, they are not suitable for captivity due to their need for precise and constant care that is difficult to meet. In many places, it is completely illegal to keep wild animals as pets.

• Archaeology suggests that human ownership of dogs as pets may date back to at least 12,000 years ago.

• Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, pet keeping in the modern sense gradually became accepted throughout Britain. Initially, aristocrats kept dogs for both companionship and hunting, and pet keeping was a sign of elitism within society.

• By the 19th century, the rise of the middle class stimulated the development of pet keeping, and it became inscribed within the bourgeois culture. This generated a commercial opportunity for entrepreneurs, and pet care developed into a big business by the end of the nineteenth century.

• Pets and animals had social and cultural implications throughout the nineteenth century. The categorization of dogs by their breeds reflected the hierarchical, social order of the Victorian era. Middle-class owners valued the ability to associate with the upper-class through ownership of their pets.

• The popularity of dog and pet keeping generated animal fancy. Dog fanciers showed enthusiasm for owning pets, breeding dogs, and showing dogs in various shows. The Kennel Club was created in 1873 to ensure fairness and organization within dog shows.

• One group of capuchin monkeys was observed appearing to care for a marmoset, a fellow New World monkey species, however, pet ownership by animals in the wild, as an analogue to the human phenomenon, has not been observed and is likely non-existent in nature.

• Human relationships with animals have an exclusive human cognitive component, and pet-keeping is a fundamental and ancient attribute of the human species.

• Anthropomorphism, or the projection of human feelings, thoughts and attributes on to animals, is a defining feature of human pet-keeping. The study identifies it as the same trait in evolution responsible for domestication and concern for animal welfare.

• It is debated whether this redirection of human nurturing behavior towards non-human animals, in the form of pet-keeping, was maladaptive, due to being biologically costly, or whether it was positively selected for.

• Two studies suggest that the human ability to domesticate and keep pets came from the same fundamental evolutionary trait and that this trait provided a material benefit in the form of domestication that was sufficiently adaptive to be positively selected for.

• A 2011 study suggests that the practical functions that some pets provide, such as assisting hunting or removing pests, could have resulted in enough evolutionary advantage to allow for the persistence of this behavior in humans and outweigh the economic burden held by pets kept as playthings for immediate emotional rewards.

• Animals in captivity, with the help of caretakers, have been considered to have owned "pets." Examples of this include Koko the gorilla, Tonda the orangutan, and Tarra the elephant.