Health Benefits of Living with Dogs
The benefits to human health associated with having a canine companion around the house are numerous, but very often understated. Some are pretty obvious. If you take looking after your dog(s) seriously, you will be out walking with them for at least a couple of hours a day, exercising them and yourself. If you have young dogs and you walk briskly or even jog, then you are going to be burning off calories working out doing something which is hopefully enjoyable for both you and your dogs. Even a slower ramble with the oldies strengthens bone and muscle and gets your circulation going, helping to unclog those veins and arteries which our increasingly sedentary lifestyles impose upon us. It’s not just the physical benefits of walking either; just being out and about in the fresh air and the sunshine (or even the wind and the rain!) is mentally stimulating and one of the best cures for mild to moderate depression. Seeing your dogs happy and running around playing, sniffing, doing doggy things and generally just enjoying themselves is uplifting in itself.
But it goes much deeper than this. Our chemistry and biology are attuned to canines in such a way that, in fact, not having dogs around is actually detrimental to our physical, emotional and mental wellbeing! If you have grown up in a household without the friendly wagging tail and toothy smile of the family hound, you have missed out considerably, in so many different ways. But why, I hear people ask? What’s so special about dogs? To which the answer is: we have evolved with canines over a period of at least 40,000 years – far longer than any other species of domesticated animal – and it is this unique symbiotic evolutionary relationship which has bonded us (mutually beneficially) so closely to our canine companions.
Humans and canines go way back into the depths of the last Ice Age when great sheets of ice over a mile thick covered much of the northern parts of North America and Eurasia. It is in this harsh and unforgiving landscape that the Tale of Two Legs and Four Paws really begins. Neanderthals (our close Hominid cousins) were numerous and widespread in Europe and Asia at that time. Anatomically modern humans started moving north into Europe from Africa in waves beginning around 40,000 BCE (during the Ice Age) to 15000BCE (when the vast glaciers finally began to melt and recede). Wolves and Neanderthals and countless other Pleistocene mammals roamed the cold, arid, windswept plains just south of the main glaciers. Homo Sapiens arrived in this frigid Garden of Eden and things began to change. Neanderthals died out eventually (though there were still tiny pockets of them about 8000BCE) and in some cases interbred with modern humans. The once huge and amazing variety of Pleistocene plains fauna also dwindled, probably from a combination of over-hunting and climate change. Homo Sapiens thrived, however– and they domesticated wolves.
According to some scientists, it was this very act of domestication of canines which gave modern humans the crucial edge over Neanderthals and which led to the latter’s long, slow demise. Dogs (friendly wolves) were excellent companions on hunts, with their superior speed, agility and tracking abilities. They were also extremely good as an early warning system around the encampments, alerting humans to the presence of danger, probably even deterring dangerous predatory animals or even rival tribes from coming near. This was, of course, many thousands of years before dogs were used as shepherds and herd guards – human society at this time was exclusively nomadic hunter-gatherer. So, in some ways, we owe our very existence to our unique friendship with dogs – we might never have thrived as a globally dominant species had we not had the benefit of hounds by our side:
