The Dogged Pursuit of a Low-Stress Life

My dog wants a piece of me. He’s standing in the bedroom doorway, all 12 pounds of him, snarling and glaring. We go through this routine every morning: I wake up an hour earlier than my wife, and if I so much as tiptoe past the bedroom, Woody forgets he’s a geriatric Jack Russell terrier mix with a few front teeth missing and turns into a bantamweight Cujo, with snapping jaws and a nasty attitude.

I don’t know what’s going on in his little brain, though I believe the three of us could fill an hour on “Jerry Springer.” (“Our dog kicked me out of the bedroom!”) I do know what runs through my own head as Woody and I have our daily standoff: What happened to all that “man’s best friend” stuff? I also think of something Ann would say while trying to convince me we should get a dog in the first place. “Pets lower your blood pressure,” she’d tell me. “They’re a calming presence.”

Ann still repeats those words, dripping in sarcasm, when we drive somewhere with Woody. Most dogs love riding in cars; Woody thrashes around and hyperventilates. But this business about pets and cardiovascular health might actually be true. According to a study that was to be presented Sunday at an American Heart Assn. meeting in Atlanta, people who own pets handle stressful situations better than those who don’t, at least as far as their blood pressure is concerned.

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University of Buffalo researcher Karen Allen assembled a group of 48 stockbrokers, all of whom lived alone and had high blood pressure, but were taking medication to keep it in check. Allen and her team gave the stockbrokers a stressful task: to make a speech explaining how they lost $75,000 of a client’s money. The brokers’ blood pressure soared an average of 18 points while breaking the bad news.

Now Allen sprung her secret weapon: pet therapy. She sent home half of the stockbrokers with dogs or cats to care for. Six months later, she gave all the study subjects another stressful task and again measured their blood pressure. And again, blood pressure in the non-pet people spiked 18 points. But the new pet owners, who were tested with their dogs or cats in the room, responded much better to stress, with their blood pressure rising only eight points.

Allen has studied other groups, including married couples, and found a similar connection between pets and healthy blood pressure. Other researchers, too, have demonstrated that furry friends are good for the heart. A 1992 Australian study involving nearly 6,000 people found that pet owners not only had lower blood pressure than their petless peers, but they also had lower levels of cholesterol and other unhealthy blood fats.

The Aussie pet owners got more exercise than those without pets, which won’t surprise anyone who has ever stumbled down a dark sidewalk on a rainy night, leash in one hand, pooper-scooper in the other. But exercise alone doesn’t explain the pet theory of good health; at least one study has shown that heart attack survivors live longer if they have any kind of pet, be it a collie or a cockatiel. And benefits of pet ownership extend beyond the heart. Earlier this spring Dr. Judith Siegel, of the UCLA School of Public Health, reported in the journal AIDS Care that men with the disease who own a dog or cat are less likely to be depressed than male AIDS patients who don’t have a pet.

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Could it be that the loyalty and companionship of a pet provide a kind of psyche-soothing mind-body therapy? The experts seem to think so, though--short of more evidence--they tend to choose their words carefully when asked why pets make us healthier and feel better. “We [humans] perceive animals as nonjudgmental,” Allen said in an interview, “and being in a nonjudgmental atmosphere has a beneficial effect.”

She seems to be saying that pets don’t care if you’re smart, slim or successful. They’re low-stress pals that won’t point out that you’ve put on a few pounds or that your lawn looks like an abandoned lot. They think you’re swell just as you are, though Woody thinks I’m even more swell when I’m dangling a beef jerky treat before him.

Yes, apart from his bizarre bedroom antics, Woody and I get along just fine. He keeps his opinions to himself, and when deadlines leave me tensed up, stopping to stroke his thick, salt-and-pepper coat for a few minutes induces a near-hypnotic sense of calm. He may cause us the occasional blood pressure spike, but let’s face it: Even your best friends rattle your whiskers now and then.

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Massachusetts freelance writer Timothy Gower is the author of “Staying at the Top of Your Game” (Avon Books, 1999). He can be reached by e-mail at tgower@capecod.net. The Healthy Man runs the second Monday of the month.