Table of contents for TIME Pets: Understanding Our Best Friends in TIME Magazine

Scientists are digging up evidence that animals can help improve mental health, even for people with challenging disorders. Though the studies are small, the findings are impressive enough that clinical settings are opening their doors to animal-assisted interventions—pet therapy, in other words—used alongside conventional medicine. “It used to be one of the great no-no’s to think of an animal in a hospital,” says Alan Beck, director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University, citing the fear of causing infection. “Now, I don’t know of any major children’s hospital that doesn’t have at least some kind of animal program.” The rise of animal therapy is backed by strong scientific results showing that social support—a proven antidote to anxiety and loneliness—can come on four legs, not just two.…

> The origin of the word “pet” is thought to have come from the Middle English pety, which means small or minor. > In 2022, 66% of American households had a pet. > Some pets can carry infections or diseases that can make humans sick, even if the pet is healthy. These are called zoonoses. > Reptiles are generally solitary animals, but some lizards and tortoises enjoy being handled from time to time. Although if they try to get away or act out, it’s best to put them back in their cage. > The oldest parrot on record died in 2016 and was at least 82 years and 88 days old. > Guinea pigs are highly social animals, so consider adopting more than one. > Parakeets are monogamous. Once…

Odds are you don’t look forward to spending time in a magnetic resonance imager—and with good reason. The clanging, coffin-like machine seems purpose-built for sensory assault. But you’re not Ninja, a pitbull mix, who trots into a lab at Emory University in Atlanta, catches a glimpse of the MRI in which she’ll spend her morning, and leaps happily onto the table. Ninja is one of the few dogs in the world that have been trained to sit utterly still in an MRI (the bits of hot dog she gets as rewards help) so that neuroscientist Gregory Berns can peer into her brain as it works. “What’s it like to be a dog?” Berns asks, a question that is both the focus of his work and the thrust of his…

Hearing HUMANS An average human can hear 20,000 vibrations per second. DOGS Dogs can hear vibrations of 35,000 per second, so they hear higher pitches than humans, and they hear sounds from much longer ranges. Hearing is their second-most dominant sense. Sight HUMANS A human’s dominant sense is sight. In 2017, a research team at Linköping University in Sweden reported in PLOS ONE that humans could discriminate objects at roughly a threefold distance in both bright and dim light as compared to dogs. DOGS It is a fallacy that dogs see in black and white. According to researchers at Neitz Labs at the University of Washington, dogs see colors in the same way that a person with red-green color blindness does. Touch HUMANS Humans are sensitive to touch and…

Most dog owners would do just about anything for their pups. And a 2018 study published in the journal Learning & Behavior says the feeling may be mutual. Plenty of research shows that dogs respond to signs of their owners’ distress, such as crying, but it hasn’t been clear to what extent pups will try to make their owners feel better. The study suggests that “dogs will actually take an action trying to alleviate that distress,” says Julia Meyers-Manor, an associate professor of psychology at Ripon College in Wisconsin and a co-author of the study. The results indicate that your pooch may empathize with and care for you even more than you know. The researchers ran an experiment with 34 dog-owner pairs from the Twin Cities area in Minnesota.…

Bo Bo, the Obama family’s Portuguese water dog, and President Barack Obama share a playful moment outside the oval office in 2009. Comet Child actor Ashley Olson with one of the dogs who played the family pet, Comet, on the hit TV series Full House in 1994. Sinbad Sinbad was a mixed breed who was classified as a non-commissioned U.S. Coast Guard officer that lived on the USCGC Campbell from 1937 to 1948. He even saw action in World War II. Toto Judy Garland, dressed as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz film, poses with Toto, a cairn terrier in 1939. Toto’s real name was Terry. Petey The beloved canine character Petey on Our Gang, later known as The Little Rascals, was played by two American pit bull terriers…

Dogs are so connected to their owners that they share similar stress levels, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Scientific Reports. When people are stressed out, researchers found, their dogs tend to be too. Certain aspects of your personality—how neurotic you are, mainly—may also affect how stressed your dog is. Researchers in Sweden surveyed the owners of 58 Shetland sheepdogs and border collies about their personality traits and those of their dogs. They then outfitted the dogs with a special collar for a week to monitor their activity levels. To measure stress levels, researchers took human and canine hair samples and analyzed concentrations of cortisol, a stress hormone, in both. The dogs’ activity levels didn’t affect how stressed they were. Neither did the dogs’ personalities (measured…

Make sure you get your new dog to the vet as soon as possible. Ask friends and family for recommendations and select one that is close to your home. Make sure they have an after-hours policy—emergencies can happen 24/7. Book your initial appointment in advance—good vets are very busy. Before You Go Before your first visit, decide if you’d like to microchip and include the costs in your budget. Plan for the costs of spaying or neutering and vaccinations too. Consider a pet insurance policy—although it won’t cover everything, pet insurance can be a blessing if your dog is involved in an accident or gets very ill. The vet will ask you to bring the dog’s paperwork and a stool sample to the first visit. Be prepared to discuss…

1. Understand how your dog cools itself Unlike humans, dogs do not self-cool through sweating. Dogs sweat mainly through their paws, which does not provide ample cooling. Instead, dogs cool themselves from the inside out. When a dog pants, it causes the moisture in their airways to evaporate and offers a cooling effect. Dogs’ blood vessels also dilate when they are hot, which brings warm blood to the surface to cool. Excessive humidity can make a dogs’ panting less effective. And because dogs cool themselves primarily through panting, putting them in front of a fan does little to help them feel cooler. If your dog is panting excessively or if their face and ears are red, give it some cool water to drink immediately. 2. Test the walking surface…

The subject line of the email from his employer was enough to whip Gus Azusenis into a frenzy. “UPDATE,” he read, a lump forming in his throat as he noted the urgency in all the capital letters. Then came the word he had been dreading for months: “RETURN.” Even without reading the message, Azusenis knew what it would say—that after more than a year, employees at his Chicago bank would be going back to the office. Anxiety consumed the financial analyst as he tried to imagine how he could properly care for Finley, his pandemic puppy, if he had to leave her alone to work long hours, five days a week. “I went into sheer planning-for-disaster mode,” Azusenis said. Across the room, blissfully unaware, Finley swished her tail back…

Dogs don’t wear pants—and it’s hard to know how things would work out if they tried. But one thing is clear: If dogs did wear pants, they would use either a belt or suspenders, but definitely not both. That, in some ways, puts them ahead of us. According to a 2016 study published in the journal Developmental Science, both domesticated dogs and one species of wild dog do a better job than human beings and chimpanzees of ignoring bad instructions and eliminating unnecessary steps when trying to solve a problem. It’s a difference that says a lot about the social order of all of the species. The study, led by Angie Johnston and Paul Holden of the Yale University Canine Cognition Center, was designed to explore the learning behavior…

Dogs were the first animals to be domesticated, with evidence suggesting they were tamed about 15,000 years ago. But the history behind how the four-legged creatures went from wild wolves to pampered pets remains hazy, scientists say. “It’s a puzzle,” said Greger Larson, a professor of evolutionary genomics in the archaeology department at the University of Oxford in England. “Rather than thinking about it as an event or a single overnight incidence, it’s a long-term multigenerational change.” Larson is part of an international team of scientists working to nail down when, where, and how many times dogs were domesticated—all questions that experts agree that, well, they just can’t agree on yet. “There’s a heck of a lot of speculation. The field really lacks a consensus,” Larson said in an…

Anna Jentoft doesn’t go to work at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle alone. Franny, her one-year-old black labradoodle, is almost always by her side, sitting at Jentoft’s desk while she’s on calls and greeting other Amazon employees during their workdays. Franny is one of more than 10,000 dogs welcome on remote calls or at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, thanks to the company’s dog-friendly work policy. The retail giant has been dog-friendly since day 1—in the early days, a husband-and-wife team brought their corgi, Rufus, to work with them, and he became a productive member of the team. Today, there’s a building on the campus named in his honor. Jentoft finds having Franny with her at work brings her comfort. “If I just need to take a breather after an intense meeting,…

If you are concerned about vaccinating your dog because it may cause autism, don’t be. There is no credible evidence that vaccinations cause autism, and not vaccinating your dog can expose it and other animals, including the humans around them, to a host of diseases. The vaccination-autism connection was born of a fraudulent 1998 study led by former British physician Andrew Wakefield, purporting to show a link between autism and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. The paper was later retracted by the journal that published it and Wakefield was stripped of his right to practice medicine in the United Kingdom. Dogs do not get autism. “We’ve never diagnosed autism in a dog,” Brooklyn veterinarian Stephanie Liff told the Brooklyn Paper in 2017 in response to an uptick in owners withholding vaccinations,…

The climate’s been so inconsistent lately—heat waves, flooding, strong thunderstorms, tornadoes—maybe you should stop listening to weather reports and go back to the only source you can really trust: your cat. That’s the suggestion of H.H.C. Dunwoody, an Army first lieutenant who suggested in 1883 that rather than putting our faith in meteorologists who can’t predict the weather “for a longer period than two or three days, and frequently not longer than 24 hours,” we should follow the wisdom of animals. In his book Weather Proverbs, unearthed by NPR, Dunwoody documents a long list of widely-held folk beliefs about weather predictions, including signals from bears, foxes, and goats, but he particularly focuses on cats. Here are some of the feline indicators Dunwoody interpreted: • When cats sneeze it is…

If you own a cat, you probably identify as something like its mother, albeit a human version, who feeds it, entertains it, and licks its fur to keep it clean (hopefully not). Unfortunately, your cat sees your pet-owner relationship much differently, according to the book Cat Sense by English anthrozoologist John Bradshaw. It actually thinks you’re a “larger, non-hostile” cat. Bradshaw, who has been studying the behavior of domesticated animals for over 40 years, reveals some fascinating explanations for why cats act the way they do around humans. For one, since cats have never been bred for a specific function other than looking nice, they’re ultimately less domesticated than the dog breeds humans have designed for chasing down game and helping around the house. Many adopted shelter cats descend…

Federal Agencies provide guidelines to Airlines to keep animals as safe as possible and monitor incidents when they come up. Prepared pet owners can also help ensure animals fly without a problem. Here’s what you need to know about traveling safely with cats, small dogs, and other animals: What kind of pets do airlines allow? The Department of Agriculture mandates how and which animals can be transported on flights, though individual carriers may have different rules. As airlines change their policies frequently, check the carrier’s website for fees, kennel requirements, size limits, and breed restrictions. Currently, Alaska Airlines is one of the few carriers that allows cats, dogs, ferrets, guinea pigs, hamsters, household birds, non-poisonous reptiles, pot-bellied pigs, rabbits, and tropical fish to fly as cargo on some aircraft.…

Dr. Will Mccauley had just finished his shift at a small Dallas animal clinic when he went home, fed his pet pot-bellied pig and then held a loaded handgun to his head. The then 33-year-old veterinarian was wracked with student debt and worn down by the daily demands at work, which included euthanizing dogs and cats and being vilified by pet owners for not meeting their expectations. “I was tired in this miserable state of mind,” he says. “It just drained me so much.” For reasons he attributes to either fear or hope, McCauley didn’t kill himself that summer day in 2016, and he quit his job later that week and stopped practicing. “I knew I had to make a change,” McCauley says. “I was dead on the inside.” The…

A dog’s sense of smell is thousands of times stronger than a human’s. Their superior snoots are why canines are used in law enforcement; once they’re trained to detect certain scents like narcotics and explosives, they can pick up traces that human noses could never notice. The same skill translates to medicine. Research shows that dogs can sniff out evidence of cancer and other diseases with impressive accuracy—and a 2022 study adds more evidence to suggest the same is true of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In the study, which was published in the journal PLOS ONE and builds on a smaller one published in 2020, dogs from French fire departments and the United Arab Emirates’s Ministry of the Interior were trained to recognize the smell of compounds…

Dogs are more than just cuddly companions—research shows that pets bring health benefits to their owners. Researchers have shown that dog owners are more active than those who don’t own dogs, packing in more steps per day on their walks or just regular playtime. A 2017 study showed that older dog owners take 2,760 more steps per day on average compared to non-owners, which amounted to an additional 23 daily minutes of moderate exercise. And a 2017 study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health showed how enduring that phenomenon is: Dog owners are also significantly more active during the winter. Researchers from University of East Anglia (UEA) and the Center for Diet and Activity Research at the University of Cambridge used data from the European Prospective Investigation…

You already know the holiday season’s steady stream of sweets and treats takes a toll on your waistline—but experts say it may also pose a risk to your pets. Veterinarians see an increase in food-related illnesses—particularly those caused by chocolate, which pets can’t digest well—from Halloween through Christmas, says Michael Topper, former president of the American Veterinary Medical Association. “You do see an uptick of this, just because it’s more readily available,” Topper says. In a 2017 study published in the journal Vet Record, University of Liverpool researchers analyzed U.K. electronic veterinary medical records and discovered a “significant peak” in canine chocolate poisoning during the Christmas season. Chocolate boxes, cakes, liqueurs, Santa figurines, and advent calendars were common culprits, according to the study. Chocolate is dangerous to pets because…

Buddie can’t afford to miss taking his meds—and it’s not easy to keep all of them straight. There is the milligram of Xanax he gets every six to eight hours. There are the 30mg of Prozac he takes daily. There used to be Valium and Ativan, but he moved on to other things when they weren’t helping. Clearly, Buddie has issues, and the fact that he’s a dog doesn’t make them easier to watch. A 13-year-old beagle-sheltie mix, he has been suffering periodic panic attacks since he was 10. The episodes usually begin with his leaping up as if he’s been bitten. He then spends days in a state of agitation and terror—with his family utterly helpless to make him feel better. “He can’t be verbally interrupted when this…

Taylor Swift’s Cats Swift is a proud cat mom who often shares photos of her felines on social media. She currently owns three cats, Scottish Folds Meredith Gray and Olivia Benson, and Benjamin Button, a Ragdoll. Swift is shown here with Olivia Benson in New York’s SoHo in 2014. Grumpy Cat Grumpy Cat, a calico-tabby whose real name was Tardar Sauce, was featured in memes, made TV appearances, starred in commercials, and was the subject of two books. She’s shown here at an event in Germany in 2017. Mr. Bigglesworth Mr. Bigglesworth was a sphynx who belonged to the Mike Meyers character Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers film series. His real name was Ted Nude-Gent. Mr. Jinx Mr. Jinx rose to fame after his appearance in the 2000…

A Basket full of fuzzy purring kittens is hard to resist, as are the adorable, heart-tugging photos rescues post on social media. But before you bring one (or two) baby felines home, make sure you are prepared to raise them responsibly. First, Make Sure You Can Afford It At times, dog ownership may be a little more taxing than being a cat parent, but you still need to make sure you can finance and support your cat in many of the same ways that you would a dog. You may look at a tiny kitten and think, this couldn’t possibly cost that much or take up so much time, but it can! For more information on the true costs of pet ownership, see “Assess Whether You Can Handle It”…