Pet Owners And Their Pets
I have had pets all my life from dogs and cats to rabbits, birds, fish and lizards. And a bug. A water beetle I named “Beetle Baily” who lived in a 2 gallon jar that I had to change the water in every couple of days which had some water plants in it. Luckily we had a river on our property so it wasn’t hard work for a 8 year old.
There was a study done in 2006 that was called: People and Their Pets: A Relational Perspective on Interpersonal Complementarity and Attachment in Companion Animal Owners.
According to an old joke, dogs and cats can be understood by the basic mani- festation of their world views: Regarding guardians (owners) a dog thinks:“This person’s great. She feeds me, she pets me, and she plays with me. She must be a god”!A cat, on the other hand, thinks: “This person’s great. She feeds me, she pets me, and she plays with me. I must be a god”!The implication in this joke is that dogs and cats have personalities that are distinctive and effective in their relationships with humans. Despite a dearth of scientific theory or evidence to support their beliefs, pet owners—on an intuitive level—frequently categorize themselves as either “cat people” or “dog people.” Those personality characteristics that distinguish these two categories of companion animal attachment, however, remain vague and ill-defined.
Many times, a scientific paper requires endless searching for “what the heck does that mean” supporting materials. This paper reads more like an article or a blog post – it’s easy to read and understand without having to read even more papers to figure out what the authors mean.
The main thrust of the first sections of the study is to set up the interpersonal relationships as a graph with Dominance-submissivenes and Hostility-friendliness as the key players in order to predict how relationships will develop. According to the authors:
In essence, people seek the security of relating to others in a way that helps maintain their own preferred styles of interacting. According to Orford (1994), those who are relatively dominant in their interpersonal orientations would feel most comfortable relating to others who are relatively more submissive in their styles of interacting.
The paper goes on to detail that “animals are significant beings in the overall schema of humans’ relatedness to the world around them” and that certain breeds of dogs and cats have certain personalities which would seem to mean that these personalities in the breeds would attract certain personalities of people to said dogs and cats. Think of the funny photos you’ve seen of owners and their dogs and how they look alike. Winston Churchill and his dog is a famous one.
The paper also delves into the research into the urbanization of the population and the lack of effect this has had on the interpersonal relationships between people and their companion pets as well as the owner’s need for dominance in the relationship between pets and humans.
The paper also has included in it the survey form that the writers used to do their research. The paper is well worth jumping into this particular rabbit hole.
The late Ted Bird, age 22
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The late Sweetie Pie