Pets don't support better health, mood or social needs

Clinical takeaway: Patients closest to their animals shared a lot of time and space with them, but heavy emotional reliance on a pet may be a cue to ask about their need for more human social support.

Pet adoption gets floated in clinics as a fix for loneliness and low mood, especially for patients living alone. Whether it works has never been well established. Studies have pointed in every direction with some showing lower mortality, others worse mental health, and plenty of null results. A new survey took a different approach, separating ownership from the texture of the relationship itself. Ownership came up empty; but the relationship sometimes didn't.

More than 60% of US households live with an animal, and loneliness and isolation are tied to mortality increases of 25% to 30%. A reliable "pet effect" would be one of the cheapest interventions in medicine. The evidence has not cooperated, however.

Pet ownership showed no link to loneliness, life satisfaction, psychological wellbeing, healthcare use, or human social support in the survey. Regular contact with animals outside the home came up just as empty.

The only differences that reached significance ran the wrong way: owners reported slightly worse self-rated health and smoked marginally more, an average of 0.19 additional cigarettes per day, a gap the authors themselves call too small to reflect a meaningful difference.

Time spent with an animal was the strongest predictor of both attachment and perceived emotional support. Both ran higher for animals living in the household, for dogs, and among women. In addition, more regular contact with less common species was tied to greater life satisfaction. Yet people who felt the most emotional support from their animals tended also to report more loneliness and lower psychological wellbeing, though these associations were weak and fell short of statistical significance.

The findings come from a cross-sectional survey representative of the Swiss adult population known as MOSAiCH in which 2,328 participants answered a pet module covering ownership, regular animal contact, species, time spent with the animal, and validated measures of attachment and perceived emotional support. Analyses of relationship factors drew on the 1,105 respondents who had pets or regular animal contact, with all models controlling for demographics including age, sex, income, education, household size, and settlement type

What's needed are longitudinal designs that can separate whether animals change health from whether health changes who acquires animals, along with objective outcome measures.

"Our findings suggest that simply owning a pet is not associated with better health or well-being. Instead, we found that the relationship people have with their animals is much more nuanced," the authors conclude. "Two people may both own a dog, but their relationships with that dog can be very different. Our findings suggest that understanding these differences may be more informative than simply comparing pet owners with non-pet owners.

They added, "Rather than asking whether someone owns a pet, future research should consider how people interact with their animals and what role the animal plays in their lives. What appeared to matter in some cases was not pet ownership itself, but whether people experienced their animal as a source of socio-emotional support and how much time they spent together."

Source: Marti R, et al. PLoS One. 2026 Jul 29. Factors of pet ownership associated with human health: A representative cross-sectional survey of Switzerland