No dog’s life for children who have canines in theirs

The stress levels of most eight- to nine-year old children in a UK study went up over a school term, but not among the group who interacted with trained dogs and their handlers, the results of the new trial show.

The peer-reviewed research, which found that primary schoolchildren who spent time individually or in groups with dogs twice a week had “significantly lower” cortisol levels at the end of term, is the latest proof that companion animals offer benefits to our physical and mental health.

The stress levels of about 50 children from four mainstream schools and seven special education needs schools in the “dog group”, who interacted with a trained dog and handler for 20 minutes twice a week for four weeks, were lower immediately after each session, unlike those of the other 100 children participating in the trial.

The stress hormone levels of the dog group were lower than the children in the “relaxation group”, who joined meditation sessions for equivalent time, researchers from the University of Lincoln reported.

The relaxation and control groups showed increases in their mean salivary cortisol levels over the course of a school term, in contrast to the pupils who hung out with dogs.

“Dog-assisted interventions can lead to lower stress levels in schoolchildren with and without special educational needs,” said first author Prof Kerstin Meints, a developmental psychologist at the university.

Having pets helps children a lot in developing empathy and kindness.

—  Vet student and former NSPCA staff member Nadia Hansa

Stressors over a long time can harm the “learning, behaviour, health and wellbeing in children over their lifespan”, said Meints.

Besides animal-assisted interventions, yoga, mindfulness, meditation, being active and teaching interventions have been tested in schools to reduce stress.

SA vet-in-training Nadia Hansa said she saw how closely children bonded to dogs when she worked for the National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NSPCA).

“We had many encounters where you wouldn’t expect a child to form a strong bond, when the dog was a guard animal or a hunting animal, and not part of the family. Yet the child had grown very attached and showed empathy to the dog,” she said.

“Having pets helps children a lot in developing empathy and kindness,” said Hansa, warning however that children exposed to cruelty to animals suffer detrimental effects, along with the animals.

Giving an example of the deep bonds children and dogs can forge, she recalled: “We once went into a very poor community near Krugersdorp where the family had four dogs but not enough money to feed themselves, let alone the dogs, so the father asked us to come and take them.

“One child was so upset that she took one dog and hid it,” said Hansa. Their team convinced the father to keep that dog, educating him on how to feed it more cheaply and donating some food. “The family kept this dog and it helped the child.”

The effects of human-animal bonding influence not only humans but also their pets.

For example, a peer-reviewed study last month found that the strength of a dog-owner attachment is reflected in how well dogs sleep in a new place.

This was the first scientific evidence that dogs’ attachment to their owners influences their sleep patterns. Researchers from the ethology department at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, conducted the research.

“The owner provides ‘safe haven’ for the dog in dangerous situations, just like the mother does for young children. If we want to use the dog as a model for human behaviour, and we do, it is important to know whether this similarity is also evident at the level of behaviour in our everyday activities,” said Márta Gácsi, senior researcher of the Comparative Ethology Research Group at the university.

“Last year we discovered in an FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) study that the dog’s attachment influences how rewarded it feels when it hears its owner’s voice. The current result is another important similarity in the mother-child context,” she said.

The sleep EEG (non-invasive electroencephalography) of 42 dogs was measured during an afternoon nap in the university’s sleep lab, while an adapted “Strange Situation Test” (developed to assess the human infant-mother bond) measured their attachment.

“Sleeping in a new place for the first time can be stressful. But these results suggest that dogs with higher attachment scores sleep better, presumably because the owner of these dogs provides a more secure environment for their dog,” said Dr Cecília Carreiro, first author of the two parallel studies published in the journal Animals.

Dogs are not only attached to people, but, as any dog owner knows, also to their toys. Further research by the Hungarian university team revealed that dogs build a “multi-modal mental image” of familiar objects.

When trying to search for them, they can imagine the “way it looks or the way it smells”, and other sensory features, said the researchers.

This was tested in a study in which three “Gifted Word Learner” dogs, who know the names of more objects than typical family dogs, needed to search for toys like their “Teddy Bear”.

The researchers watched how these dogs, in contrast to 10 family dogs, searched for the specified toy, which was in a heap with four others, in the light and the dark.

“Dogs have a good sense of smell, but we found that dogs preferred to rely on vision and used their noses only a few times, and almost only when the lights were off,” said Prof Adam Miklósi, co-author of the study, published in the journal Animal Cognition.

“The dogs’ success in finding the toys ... reveals that when dogs play with a toy, even just briefly, they pay attention to its different features and register the information using multiple senses,” said the head of the ethology department.

The quality of a dog’s life it seems is influenced not only by its multiple senses, but also attachments where the science shows the bond works both ways.

Maybe humans could learn a trick or two from the habits of their potentially soothing canine companions.