Welch 1

Kaitlyn Welch

Professor Hunter

ENG 1201

8 February 2019

Annotated Bibliography

My essay will explore the question of how pets affect human health. I know that people

that are sick usually get visits from therapy dogs and therapy dogs are used in many other ways

that improve our health and I want to know what kind of effects they have on us emotionally and

physically and how it improves our health. I want to know if they help with long term illnesses

or if the improvements they make are only temporary.

Beck, A M, and N M Meyers. “Health Enhancement and Companion Animal Ownership.”

Annual Review of Public Health​, vol. 17, no. 1, 1996, pp. 247–257.,

doi:10.1146/annurev.pu.17.050196.001335.

This is another academic journal article. It discusses how owning a pet enhances health.

It talks about how just the smallest interaction with animals can have ​physiological​ benefits.

Some of those including lowering blood pressure and improving morale and not engaging in as

many risky activities. Pets also influence young children and influences their attitudes and how

they behave. In adults pets lower the risk of ​cardiovascular disease, lower systolic blood

pressures, plasma cholesterol, and triglyceride values​. It discusses how human-companion

relationships affect humans everyday life and it also mentions that when people talk to their pets,

they are less stressed and are more comfortable and muscle tension is released.
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This article talks in depth about how animals affect us and does a very good job. It is a

good article to read if you are interested in possibly doing similar research or if you are looking

for an article that goes deeper than the surface of just the types of diseases or conditions that you

are at a lower risk of having if you own a pet, it goes deeper and talks about what happens when

you interact with or just see some different animals like just looking at fish in an aquarium can

relax you.

This is published by ​Annual Review of Public Health​, vol. 17, no. 1. It is relevant and

reliable because it discusses some research that had been done and the authors are credible

because they did the research for this and back everything up very well. It was published in

1996 so it’s a little outdated, but the information is still relevant.

I plan on using this to discuss how pets not only improve adult’s health, but also

children’s health. I also want to talk about how just the slightest interaction with an animal can

improve your health and this article talks about that a lot.

Cohut, Maria. “How Dogs Contribute to Your Health and Happiness.” ​Medical News Today,​

MediLexicon International, 26 Aug. 2018,

www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322868.php​.

In this article Cohut talks about how dogs can improve your health. One big benefit of

having a dog is that your physical health improves because when you own a dog you have to

walk them and make sure they get enough exercise and in turn you get exercise so physically you

are healthier. When pregnant women are exposed to dogs it has an affect on the baby and the

baby has a lower risk of developing eczema and when kids are exposed to some of the bacterias
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that dogs carry, they are at lower risk of developing asthma. Dogs also improve our

emotional/mental health because when we see them we immediately cheer up because they cause

our oxytocin levels to increase drastically and with that increase in oxytocin, our psychological

health improves and with that diseases like depression decrease in dog owners.

This is more of an academic article because it gives you a lot of information from studies

that were conducted and isn’t written in a way that is just trying to convince you to get a dog, it

provides actual results from studies and credits other sources such as an interview from ​The

Washington Post. ​It is supposed to inform you about what kinds of benefits dogs give you and it

backs up the reasons with evidence from studies or other sources.

This article is from “Medical News Today”. The author is credible and what she is

saying is reliable because the author has evidence to back up claims. This is a pretty recent

article, it was published on August 26, 2018. This is relevant to my research question because it

provides information that supports my claim that pets improve our lives in a big way.

I plan on using this source to provide reasons how and why pets improve our lives. It not

only provides information for how they help us in our lifetime, but also when we are in the

womb and I don’t think that I have any other sources that have that.

Kraft, Amy. ​CBS News​, CBS Interactive, 11 May 2015,

www.cbsnews.com/news/how-a-dog-can-improve-your-health/​.

This is a video from CBS News. This video starts out with an interview with a woman

who claims that everyone in her family including the dog is happier and healthier since they got

the dog. She claims that because in her family they had been getting more physical activity
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because they walk their dog many times a day which not only exercises the dog, but it exercises

the members of the family too. A woman from Harvard Medical School states that dogs can

lower blood pressure and people maintain a healthy and lower BMI. They also reduce

loneliness, stress, anxiety, and depression. When you interact with a dog your stress hormone

decreases and your love hormone increases.

This had obviously aired on television so it was intended for anyone and everyone. It’s

giving you a heartwarming story about a family whose lives improved since getting a dog and

it’s supposed to make you want to get a dog too, especially if you are lonely, suffer from anxiety,

depression, and stress.

This was published by CBS News. This is a credible source because it was made by

professional journalists and that also makes it reliable because it gets information from people

from Harvard Medical School who has studied the subject. This is relevant because it gives an

example of how a pet has improved the aspects of a families lives.

I will use this to give an example of how people’s lives can change just by owning a pet.

It supports everything I have found in other articles about how owning a dog or pet lowers stress

and anxiety and depression and people don’t feel as lonely when they own a pet and I am going

to use that in my research paper.

McNicholas, June, et al. “Pet Ownership and Human Health: a Brief Review of Evidence and

Issues.” ​The BMJ​, British Medical Journal Publishing Group, 24 Nov. 2005,

www.bmj.com/content/331/7527/1252?ecoll=​.
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In this journal article McNicholas points out some research that was conducted in the 80s

that does not support the idea that there is a direct connection between owning a pet to improving

human health. The research does not support that owning a pet lowers cardiovascular disease

and other diseases like that. She mentions that they do help in a few ways such as reducing

stressful events such as anxiety related illness and can enhance the recovery from illnesses like a

stroke, myocardial infarction, and cancer. This article basically states that owning a pet is more

for social support and improves the social aspect of your life and not so much physical and

psychological improvements.

This journal is targeting students and other adults who are needing to go deeper with the

question of do pets improve our health and need an explanation that is longer than two sentences.

This pushes you to actually think about what a pet does for you because this kind of disproves

what a lot of the other articles that I have say, but does support that pets improve our lives in at

least ones aspect and that is in the social aspect.

This was published by ​British Medical Journal Publishing Group. June is a psychologist

and knows if there would be any psychological benefits or not because she is a licensed

psychologist. The article is a little outdated, but the information is still relevant and is reliable

because the author is credible and reliable.

I plan on using the information from this journal because even though it disproves what a

lot of the other articles that I found say, it does have some that supports that pets improve our

lives in one way and that is that they help us socially. If this did not have that, then I wouldn’t

use this, but since this goes into some detail about how it benefits us in that way more than in a
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physical and psychological way, then I plan on using it to strengthen the argument that pets

improve our lives in multiple ways.

Moseley, Megan. “Feeling Down? Get a Pet!” ​GOODHEALTH​, 5 Nov. 2012,

eds-b-ebscohost-com.sinclair.ohionet.org/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=49&sid=25a667

3d-b2ba-4889-b136-752d73bfacc9@sdc-v-sessmgr05.

This is a newspaper article. In this article Moseley talks about how pets improve our

mental state of mind. She mentions that the “Journal of Social Issues titled the Effects of

Animals on Human Health and Well-Being” talks about how just stroking your pet can lower

blood pressure and heart rate and that it lowers stress. This article just basically states that

everyone should own a pet because they can make you happy. It talks about how therapy dogs

improve the lives of those that they are around and those people are happy when the dog is in

their presence.

This is a short article, but it does give some support to my claim. Even though the main

goal of the article is to persuade you that owning a pet is good for you, it still makes some good

points and has some good evidence to support what they are stating.

This is a reliable source because it is published from EBSCOhost which is from the

Sinclair online database and sources from there are usually reliable. It’s from ​The Athens NEWS

Contributor ​and was published in 2012 so I would say it’s credible. It was written with the

purpose to persuade you that getting a pet is a good idea and uses many reasons to support why.

I will use this to put more in the beginning because it pretty much just tells you that you

should get a pet and a few reasons why, but the article doesn’t really go into much depth
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compared to the other articles, so this might be used in the beginning or to help reenforce an

argument.

Muldoon, Abigail. “Figure 2f from: Irimia R, Gottschling M (2016) Taxonomic Revision of

Rochefortia Sw. (Ehretiaceae, Boraginales). Biodiversity Data Journal 4: e7720.

Https://Doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.4.e7720.” ​A Web-Based Study of Dog Ownership and

Depression Among People Living With HIV ​, Nov. 2017,

doi:10.3897/bdj.4.e7720.figure2f.

This is an academic journal article. It discusses a disease that a lot of people suffer from

and that is HIV. It talks about some ​psychosocial benefits and most of them stem from owning a

dog. One big benefit is that it lowers depression and this source really discusses and goes deep

in how dogs lower depression in those living with HIV. They conducted a study on how dogs

affect depression in those that are diagnosed with HIV and found that the odds of depression in

those who don’t own a dog were 3 times higher than those who do. It also discusses that owning

a dog has many positive physical, psychological, and psychosocial outcomes in their health.

Some of those include cardiovascular benefits, lower depression, and improved general

psychological well-being.

This article is taking the idea that dogs can help with diseases and it’s narrowing in on

HIV and how dogs can help with depression in those individuals that suffer from it. I like this

because it’s different than regular articles and I like how it was focused on how it affects people

with a certain disease which I don’t think I have any other articles like it.
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This is published from ​EBSCOhost so it’s from the Sinclair database and that would

mean that it is reliable. The author is reliable because she was one of the people who conducted

the study. It was published in 2017 so it is very recent and the information is relevant to what I

am looking for.

I will use this as evidence that pets, but mainly dogs improve people who are suffering

from diseases. One thing that I was planning on focusing on was talking about how animals

improve people’s lives who are living with diseases because we kind of already know that pets

can improve people who aren’t suffering from any diseases, but knowing how they help people

who do suffer from diseases will help provide another point to my argument.

​ age Publications, 1998. Google books

Wilson, Cindy C. ​Companion Animals in Human Health, S

Web. 3 Feb. 2019

This is a book that I found online. In the book it refers to many different types of

experiments that were conducted. Something that was found from the research was that people

who don’t own cats had more symptoms psychological ill health than those who do. This book

discusses more of the social support aspect of owning a pet than anything. It talks about how

those who own a pet see the doctor less than those who don’t own a pet, but that was referring

more to the people who own dogs since dogs need exercise and when the dog gets exercise then

the owner does too. They had found that some of the biggest ways that pets impact humans were

in cardiovascular risks were lower and that pet owners had exercised more than non-pet owners.

This book is a little confusing because there were a lot of experiments that were done, but

there was a lot of information that I found that was useful. I think that this source went the
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deepest than any other article that I have and explains a lot of what they are trying to find

through the experiments. This was intended for people who wanted to know more about the

topic and for people with higher education since it is a little wordy and confusing.

This was published by Sage Publications. This is a reliable source and the author is

credible because this has a lot of science to back it up and through a lot of experiments had come

to find many things about what health condition and aspects actually improves and what doesn’t.

This is a little outdated and some of the experiments mention that some further science is needed,

but some of the information is definitely relevant.

I plan on using this to maybe start with and use information from other sources to back it

up. This also discusses some things that they found that they claim has no effect on us has

actually been disproved so I will probably use this as a way to bring up what some people might

say that pets don’t impact our health and then explain how that is wrong and then tell why with

other sources I have.