The Reasons Behind Our Co-Dependency

What is it about Rover and Fluffy that makes us depend on them emotionally often in the same way that we depend on our human relationships? Following is a list of reasons given by experts.

* Unlike humans, pets really do love unconditionally. “The one thing that a pet does for you is they love you no matter what,” says Ginger Hamilton, a psychologist who works with people and their pets in Bella Vista, Ark. “You don’t have to make any explanations to them--they are just there with open paws.” Perhaps a woman, who asked not to be identified, characterized it best when she quipped: “Your marriage might not last, but you know that your relationships with your pets will.”

* Pet companionship offers concrete health-giving effects. Medical studies prove that pets lower blood pressure, increase survival rates of heart attack victims, give elderly folks raison d’e^tre, decrease visits to the doctor and are therapeutic for the disabled and mentally ill.

* They give order to an otherwise chaotic universe. “They regularize your life,” said Stanley Coren, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and author of “The Intelligence of Dogs” (Bantam, 1995). “The beast has to be let out or fed. Freud said that work and routine are great healers.”

* They cue our softer side, sometimes even dissolving walls of silence in therapeutic and familial relationships. Psychologist Herb Nieburg, who practices at Four Winds Hospital in New York’s Westchester County, says dogs and cats naturally elicit the human urge to stroke or pet an animal (unless you are allergic to them). Yukon, Nieburg’s yellow Labrador often accompanies the psychologist to his office and if that doesn’t loosen up his tongue-tied patients, they are invited to bring their own friend .

“This adolescent was having trouble coming to see me, so I told him that he could bring a friend,” says Nieburg, who co-wrote “The Loss of a Pet” (HarperCollins, 1982). “So he brought in a ferret. And it got loose, it hid behind the radiator and we had to fish it out and it [messed] all over my office. But we got really close because of that ferret. . . . I’ve had people break engagements over their pets”--such as a fiance who hated cats.

* Pets link us to nature and to our evolutionary roots. “There is, somehow, in our cultural mind, a yearning for animals because we come from a symbiotic relationship with nature,” said Bernard E. Rollin, a philosophy professor at Colorado State University at Fort Collins who has written about people and their pets. “It’s in our cosmic consciousness because of our agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies. It’s only in the last 50 years that we evolved into an industrialized nation cut off from animals.”

Still other researchers speculate about Americans’ growing obsession with pets and the increasing numbers of childless couples (census data shows that twice as many women are childless today as were in 1960 and women have 1.6 fewer children than they did 35 years ago). No one knows for sure if there is a direct link, but some researchers venture a guess that for the childless, pets are surrogate children who never grow up: Dependent, vulnerable and ever adoring, they elicit many of the same qualities in their owners that babies do from parents.

“There is a real need to have something be dependent on you,” Coren said. “Pets produce an automatic caring in us. If you aren’t going to have children, you can get all the affection from pets. This thing looks at you with great big brown eyes that say, ‘Love me.’ You get that nice little warm feeling, but the responsibility is not as deep. You are never going to get that phone call saying, ‘Your son just ran the car into a telephone pole.’ ”