8 March 2010

Keeping a pet dog could provide owners with important non-human support, the director of a pet behaviour research centre in the US has told The Times.

Dr James Serpell of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania told the newspaper that dogs provide their owners with a type of support "where traditional support has broken down".

People are turning to dogs "to compensate for that loss", he added in an interview with the paper's Deborah Ross.

Dogs could be performing an important human function and helping their owners through difficult life events, the doctor added.

"If you look at all the demographic statistics people are getting divorced more, having fewer children and have fewer friends as well as less social contact.

"A graph showing this decline is almost a mirror image of the one showing the rise in pet ownership."

Other benefits that owning a dog can bring include having lower blood pressure and cholesterol, research by a psychologist at Queen's University in Belfast found in 2007.

Dr Deborah Wells found pet owners tended to be healthier than the general population and wrote in the British Journal of Health Psychology that the social support offered by dogs is greater than the support another human could provide.