So, again dog “owners” against cat “owners”… Will this ever end?
Now there is a study that tries to prove levels of satisfaction according to the pet you have at home. It was presented last Thursday at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Convention in San Diego and it compares satisfaction and happiness levels with pet “ownership”.
The study is called “Is happiness a warm puppy? Examining the relationship between pets and well-being” and it was conducted by a team led by Katherine Jacobs Bao from Manhataville College in New York.
The team recruited 263 American adults between 19 and 68 years old –some were pet “owners” and some not. They completed a questionnaire about pet ownership and personality and the conclusions were the following:
- People with pets are more satisfied with their lives than people without pets; they are happier and more positive
- Dog “owners” are happier, more conscious, more agreeable and more extrovert than cat “owners”
- Cat “owners” are more neurotic than “dog owners”
Whether this proves that cats make you neurotic or because you are neurotic you will most likely pick a cat, Dr Bao escapes the generalization by saying: “Personality likely influences our choices to adopt a pet and which pet we choose, but our personality is not fixed, so it could also be influenced by our relationships with others, including our pets”.
So basically, ‘we cannot tell’.
Then what is this study actually proving? If I have a cat and dog, does that make me a balanced person in life?
The actual result may be to make the breach bigger between dog guardians (I do not like the word ‘owners’) and cat guardians. Like if we are not divided enough…
We spend too much time and too much energy trying to prove who is better than the other one. Is it better the person that has dogs than the one that has cats? Is it better the person than adopts than the person that buys? Is it better who adopts a mutt than who adopts a purebred?
Why are we so obsessed with that?
And now we have “scientific” proof… Maybe we should just stop comparing.
Animals make the world a better place; they make us better people in their own special way. Is it really necessary to determine which animal makes us better than someone else?
What do you think?
Via: Cnet | Daily Mail | Telegraph | Details
