When Covid-19 lockdowns began in 2020, many people turned to pet ownership as a panacea for their isolation and worsening mental health, but a new study reveals that the much-touted “pandemic puppies” and other pets were not the emotional life rafts people hoped for.
Researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark and King’s College London drew on data collected in the Repeated Assessment of Mental Health in Pandemics project, a year-long survey in which 6,018 UK residents aged 16 and older completed online questionnaires in April 2020 and every three months for the next year.
In analysing pet ownership in relation to measures of depression, anxiety, anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure) and loneliness, they found pet owners reported slightly worse levels of the first three than non-pet owners.
Lead author Christine Parsons, a Department of Clinical Medicine professor at Aarhus University, was “genuinely surprised” by the results. While the findings do not indicate pets are bad for us, they do suggest that we shouldn’t rely on a new furry friend to fix our mental health problems. “Our findings suggest that while pets can provide companionship, they are by no means a cure-all for mental health issues”, said Parsons, “especially during stressful times like a pandemic.”
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At the same time, Study Finds, a website geared toward making scientific research accessible to laypeople, outlined several limitations of the study, namely that self-reported data is subject to bias, there was no detailed information about relationships with pets or adoption decisions, and that even a large sample size is not necessarily representative of a population.
The pandemic is another confounding variable. Concerns about pet care, veterinary access and financial strain were intensified during this uncertain time, potentially offsetting many of the positive aspects of pet ownership.
Many of those so-called pandemic puppies (and quarantine kitties) have since been returned or rehomed as owners found themselves ill-suited to care for the animals or struggled with how the pandemic affected their pets. Dogs especially suffered from lack of socialisation during lockdown, as well as isolation when their human companions returned to the office, leading to behavioural issues.
