Owning a pet is one of life’s great adventures. When you take in a puppy, kitten, or stray dog, you form social bonds that typically last for the life of the animal. Children adopt the pets as one of the family and pamper them with treats and playful activities. When they get sick, pet owners will put a mortgage on the house to get them the best treatment possible.
How Do Pets Impact Elder Adults’ Health Both Mentally and Physically?
When it comes to senior citizens, pets are a great comfort as they age and the opportunities to make new friends and socialize become limited. Humans are inherently social creatures. And a lack of human contact can cause depression, anxiety, stress, and health problems. Pets can fill the void by giving us a warm fuzzy person to pet, walk, and feed who will always love us unconditionally.
Taking care of a pet also reduces cognitive decline because it forces elders to solve new situations each day. The interactions people have with pets are never the same. The pets can go through their own moods and range from playful to lethargic. Pets tend to get excited any time they smell food or sense something going on.
In this manner, pets add dimension to life. They help elders create new synapses in their brains to ward off the effects of dementia. Pets also keep them interested in life because they have someone important to care for and need to keep schedules and remember to pick up food and supplies for the pet.
The most important feature of the relationship is that pets provide seniors with attention when most of their family members are preoccupied with the rat race and their own lives. Seniors feel a sense of purpose when they have someone who depends on them daily. Pets can also be used as an incentive for grandchildren and other family to visit more often, a playmate for children.
Pets make seniors happy because pets are cute and often engage in mischievous conduct that can rise a laugh out of anyone. Pets also give seniors someone to talk to daily when no one else is around. This type of interaction can stimulate the speech centers of the brain and keep the personality of seniors intact as their occupational social lives deteriorate.
Do Pets Keep You Young?
Pets can motivate the elderly to stay young, fit, and healthy by providing them with an incentive to function in life. Without a pet, many seniors have little more to do than sit around and watch television and prepare some meals for themselves. Perhaps, this is why more than fifty percent of all seniors do own a pet.
Pets can incentivize seniors to go out for a long walk to get their dog some exercise. And this can lead to social situations where people at dog parks approach them and strike up conversations or pet the animals. Even walking around with a parrot on your shoulder is bound to garnish some attention. And this can incentivize seniors to go out more and feel relevant in society instead of just vegetating in a comatose state at home.
Sitting around causes the muscles to atrophy and progresses over time into crippling weakness that incapacitates many seniors. It is common sense that seniors who walk a dog regularly, for example, are bound to get more exercise and stay healthier and younger than someone who sits in a recliner all day living vicariously through Hollywood actors.
Everyone has two ages, a chronological age counting from the day they were born and a biological age of health. While it is impossible to change your chronological age, it is easy to see the major gap in biological health between people in their 40’s and 50’s.
Many people in this age range are already fully gray and feeble and look like they are in their 70’s. On the other hand, many people in this age range can also still look like they are in their 20’s or 30’s. The stark contrast between the health of middle-aged people highlights how important it is for seniors to choose lifestyles that reduce the slow accumulation of senile cells that causes aging.
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