Why Do Animals Like to Die Alone
The recent popularity of "designer" dogs, cats, micro-pigs and other pets may seem to advise that pet keeping is no more than a fad. Indeed, information technology is often assumed that pets are a Western arrayal, 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 picayune in the way of material benefits. But during the 2008 fiscal crisis, spending on pets remained almost unaffected, which suggests that for about owners pets are not a luxury but an integral and securely loved role of the family unit.
Some people are into pets, withal, while others simply aren't interested. Why is this the case? It is highly probable that our want for the company of animals actually goes back tens of thousands of years and has played an important function in our evolution. If so, then genetics might help explain why a beloved of animals is something some people just don't become.
The health question
In recent times, much attention has been devoted to the notion that keeping a dog (or possibly a cat) can do good the possessor's wellness in multiple ways – reducing the risk of heart disease, combating loneliness, and alleviating depression and the symptoms of depression and dementia.
As I explore in my new book, at that place are two bug with these claims. First, there are a similar number of studies that suggest that pets have no or even a slight negative bear upon on health. Second, pet owners don't live any longer than those who have never entertained the idea of having an animal about the house, which they should if the claims were true. And even if they were existent, these supposed health benefits but apply to today'southward stressed urbanites, not their hunter-gatherer ancestors, so they cannot exist considered as the reason that nosotros began keeping pets in the first identify.
The urge to bring animals into our homes is and so widespread that it's tempting to think of it every bit a universal characteristic of human being nature, just not all societies take a tradition of pet-keeping. Even in the West there are plenty of people who feel no particular affinity for animals, whether pets or no.
The pet-keeping habit often runs in families: this was once ascribed to children coming to imitate their parents' lifestyles when they go out home, but recent inquiry 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.
So the genes that promote pet-keeping may exist unique to humans, but they are not universal, suggesting that in the past some societies or individuals – but not all – thrived due to an instinctive rapport with animals.
Pet DNA
The DNA of today's domesticated animals reveals that each species separated from its wild counterpart between 15,000 and 5,000 years agone, in the late Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods. Yeah, this was also when we started breeding livestock. But it is not easy to encounter how this could have been achieved if those start dogs, cats, cattle and pigs were treated as mere commodities.
If this were so, the technologies available would accept been inadequate to prevent unwanted interbreeding of domestic and wild stock, which in the early on stages would have had gear up access to 1 another, endlessly diluting the genes for "tameness" and thus slowing further domestication to a crawl – or even reversing it. Also, periods of famine would also have encouraged the slaughter of the convenance stock, locally wiping out the "tame" genes entirely.
But if at least some of these early on domestic animals had been treated as pets, concrete containment within human habitations would have prevented wild males from having their mode with domesticated females; special social status, as afforded to some extant hunter-gatherer pets, would have inhibited their consumption as food. Kept isolated in these ways, the new semi-domesticated animals would have been able to evolve away from their ancestors' wild ways, and become the pliable beasts we know today.
The very same genes which today predispose some people to accept on their first true cat or dog would have spread among those early farmers. Groups which included people with empathy for animals and an agreement of animal husbandry would take flourished at the expense of those without, who would take had to continue to rely on hunting to obtain meat. Why doesn't everyone feel the same mode? Probably because at some point in history the alternative strategies of stealing domestic animals or enslaving their human carers became feasible.
There's a final twist to this story: recent studies have shown that affection for pets goes hand-in-hand with concern for the natural world. It seems that people tin can be roughly divided into those that feel niggling affinity for animals or the environment, and those who are predisposed to delight in both, adopting pet-keeping equally one of the few available outlets in today's urbanised gild.
As such, pets may assist us to reconnect with the world of nature from which we evolved.
Why Do Animals Like to Die Alone
Source: https://theconversation.com/the-science-behind-why-some-people-love-animals-and-others-couldnt-care-less-84138
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