Pets Go to Work to Help Relieve Stress on the Job

Late every afternoon, Thousand Oaks stockbroker Matthew N. Morrison drops fish food into his aquarium. In Oxnard, radio station manager Penny Ema empties a can of cat food into a bowl. Then they leave work and head home for the evening, leaving their pets behind.

Reversing the usual pattern of keeping animals at home, dozens of Ventura County residents are celebrating Be Kind to Animals Week on the job.

While there are no national statistics available, animal experts said workplace pets may be catching on in the 1990s, as people spend more time at work and less time at home.

Deena Case-Pall, a Camarillo-based psychologist and animal consultant, said she has noticed a trend of more people bringing dogs to work. And Jolene Hoffman, director of the Ventura County Humane Society shelter, said she has seen small but increasing numbers of people adopting pets for their businesses.

Many experts said that placing animals in office, school and business environments helps people by reducing on-the-job stress and helps pets by providing them with more care than they would receive in an empty home.

“They probably get more attention than most house pets whose owners aren’t home except to sleep or eat,” said Kathy Jenks, director of the Ventura County Animal Regulation Department.

In fact, it is the rare pair of house pets that could attract 50 guests, including the superintendent of the Ventura Unified School District, to their wedding.

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Yet that is exactly who showed up at the nuptial ceremonies of Boris and Natasha, two lop-eared rabbits who live in a classroom at Balboa Middle School in Ventura. Students in the class sent out invitations and baked a three-tiered wedding cake for the February event.

The male and female rabbits were kept in separate cages until the school principal joined them in matrimony. Natasha gave birth to bunnies 31 days later, said teacher Nancy Nauman, who said the animals are used to teach math, language skills and family living to 13 severely learning-impaired seventh- and eighth-grade students.

Like the educational rabbits, the cat at the Sheriff’s Department shooting range in Camarillo has a practical purpose.

“He keeps down the rodent population,” range master Ronald Roark said.

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With the Sheriff’s Department, the public schools and Port Hueneme City Hall all playing host, government buildings seem particularly receptive to animals.

The most sedate of private businesses get into the act, too, however, although perhaps with animals more appropriate to the corporate setting.

Before Morrison feeds his fish, for instance, he bends under a burnished mahogany desk that holds two computer terminals crammed with financial figures, and he opens a freezer containing brine shrimp, sponges or a vegetable mixture. Then he strides across the room and plunges his hand into a 225-gallon aquarium, mounted in a custom-built mahogany credenza that matches his desk.

The batfish and clown fish nibble eagerly out of his fingertips. Two small sharks, though, must be fed with a special tube.

“This business is rather stressful,” said Morrison, a senior vice president of investments for Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. “The fish are very relaxing. I like looking at them.”

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Corporate sharks aside, however, pets remain most practical in round-the-clock businesses such as hospitals and radio stations, and in small businesses where owners can set their own policies allowing them to take their pets to work.

Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks keeps a cat named Max. Simi Valley Hospital has Sadie the dog. Q105 FM in Oxnard is home to a cat named Booters that disc jockeys feed on the weekends.

“She’s an incredible stress reliever,” said station manager B.J. Young.

And Ventura Bookstore owner Ed Elrod takes two parrots and two dogs to work with him every day.

“The parrots get cranky if they’re home alone all the time,” he said, adding that having animals around reduces the tedium of dealing with computers and publishers.

Still, there are some workplaces where animals are not welcome. One of those places, strangely enough, is the office of Cat Fancy magazine, a nationally distributed periodical for cat lovers. The magazine runs a feature on “working cats” every few years.

Editor Debbie Phillips-Donaldson said the magazine once kept cats at its Mission Viejo headquarters, but not anymore.

“The company kept growing,” she said. “Some people had allergies.”