The "Why Do We Humans Love Our Pets So Much" Story

It was an ordinary day.  My "Sweetie" is sitting on the bottom of my recliner sound asleep while I am watching "Leave It To Beaver" on ME TV.   My "Sweetie" in this case is my kitty that we call "The Gray Lady."  It's been a little over four years since she and her buddy, whom we call "Snickerdoodle" showed up at the back door with the most pathetic looks on their faces, searching for a handout of food.  Carol managed to grab "Snickeredoodle" and pull him into the kitchen before walking with him into our office where he would spend the next week or so getting to know us before we allowed him free reign of the house.  Then one day after Snickerdoodle was beginning to feel comfortable with us in the same room, we opened the rear door to feed the birds and just as quick as could be..."The Gray Lady" flashed right past us into our dining room.  

The Gray Lady hoping to get in the back door

Well, we made a few changes and before long "Snickerdoodle" was roaming the house while "The Gray Lady" was getting to know us a bit better while living in our office.  The two would talk back and forth to eat other and Carol and I would try and hold both of them to try to domesticate them as house cats.  I'm sure there are many reading my story today that are much like Carol and me, but there are also just as many who would never allow a feline to roam their house...be it a stray or have a pedigree.  Dogs...yes, but not a cat.  And...that's OK since there are probably just as many whom would rather have a cat than a dog.  But, be they a cat or a dog, just why do we humans love our pets so much?  Well, there's this guy, Clive Wynne, who is the director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, that tells about the evolutionary relationship between animals and people.  "The success of dogs and cats on the surface of the Earth is entirely due to the fact that we take some level of care of them."  Now, there are a few scientists who claim that pets seem to display a form of parasitism by taking food and shelter from humans without offering much in return.  They say that we love our pets because they have hoodwinked us into it.  But...Clive doesn't buy that theory, but does find it hard to understand the warm, gooey feeling we get when we look at our dogs and cats.  The love story between pets and people began at least 1,500 years ago when wild animals scavenged human garbage pits and eventually began to get closer and then moved into human settlements.  Then people began to breed the cutest, cuddliest and most cooperative creatures until we got the pets we know today.  So, we began to name our pets and before long we began to love the animals just the same as the animals began to love us.  For several decades it was believed that pet ownership was good for a human's physical and mental health until a study in 2009 of nearly 40,000 people in Sweden found that pet owners suffered from more mental health problems than their non-pet owners.  But hey, that's in Sweden and that doesn't count in Lancaster, Pennsylvania!  But, some claim that our love of pets is purely social, rather than biological while others say pets are good for your mental health.  Well, one way or another, our two cats give us so much enjoyment that we would be lost without them.  "The Gray Lady" is a very small gray cat while "Snickerdoodle" is more than twice her size and perhaps a bit overweight.  

Snickerdoodle

The two of them love to spend time together and love to play with the toys we supply for them.  They used to sleep in our bedroom with us, but we now find that they enjoy wrestling too much, so we need to pen them out of our bedroom at night.   Mr. Wynne is doing research, trying to explain our love of out pets.  Perhaps an experiment that would examine our brain while we look at our cats and dogs would be interesting.  But, domesticated dogs and cats are more childlike that wild cats and dogs, so he's not sure what to expect with his experiment.  Perhaps, he found, that humans are actually programmed to love soft and helpless things.  Carol and I have found that to be true and the love we have for our two felines brings us happiness every day or our lives.  And...it has been the same with all the other pets, both dogs and cats, we have had during our over 50 years of married life.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.