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posted by martyb on Sunday October 01 2017, @11:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the Bow-Wow-Meow-Squeak! dept.

The recent popularity of "designer" dogs, cats, micro-pigs and other pets may seem to suggest that pet keeping is no more than a fad. Indeed, it is often assumed that pets are a Western affectation, a weird relic of the working animals kept by communities of the past.

About half of the households in Britain alone include some kind of pet; roughly 10m of those are dogs while cats make up another 10m. Pets cost time and money, and nowadays bring little in the way of material benefits. But during the 2008 financial crisis, spending on pets remained almost unaffected, which suggests that for most owners pets are not a luxury but an integral and deeply loved part of the family.

Some people are into pets, however, while others simply aren't interested. Why is this the case? It is highly probable that our desire for the company of animals actually goes back tens of thousands of years and has played an important part in our evolution. If so, then genetics might help explain why a love of animals is something some people just don't get.

[...] The pet-keeping habit often runs in families: this was once ascribed to children coming to imitate their parents' lifestyles when they leave home, but recent research has suggested that it also has a genetic basis. Some people, whatever their upbringing, seem predisposed to seek out the company of animals, others less so.

Is the desire to keep pets really hard-wired in our DNA?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @04:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @04:08PM (#575946)

    I agree. For example, the "guilty look" phenomenon, which appears to not be a real thing:

    https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/dog-spies/the-guilty-looking-companion/ [scientificamerican.com]
    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376635714003210 [sciencedirect.com]

    I also vaguely remember some study where they show photographs of dogs to dog owners and asked if they looked guilty, to which everybody said no. Then they showed the same photos to another group of dog owners and said it was taken right after the dog broke something, and everybody said the guilt was obvious in the photos.

    People like to anthropomorphize animals and ascribe to them false attributes. Add that to confirmation bias, and hidden feedback cycles between the dog and the owner (e.g. how drug sniffing dog handlers can get their dogs to flag false positives), and you have a recipe for confusion.

    There is too much pseudo-science of pets, in my personal opinion.