Reduce Stress With a Guardian Angel
>> Monday
TWO WEEKS ago an eleven year-old boy in Canada was gathering firewood to bring into the house, just like any other day, when his golden retreiver, Angel, began walking next to the boy rather than running around the yard as she usually did.
Suddenly a cougar lept at the boy from about ten feet away. But the cougar was intercepted mid-charge by Angel as she jumped over a lawn mower to intervene. "I was just lucky my dog was there, because it happened so fast I wouldn’t have known what hit me," said the boy in an interview afterwards.
The cougar seized Angel's head in its jaws and the boy ran to tell his mother, who called the Mounties, who then saved Angel from the death grip of the cougar.
Stories like this show us the survival value of owning a dog, but there is a much more common effect dogs have: Their presence tends to improve your mood. If you've been on the fence about getting a dog, you should consider this important fact: Having a dog lowers stress and improves your health.
Further reading: Reduce Stress, Get a Dog
1 comments:
This just in...
"The organizers of the 12th International Conference of Human-Animal Interactions have announced that at their meeting this July, scientists will be presenting their latest findings confirming that friendly human-dog interaction releases oxytocin in both human and dog."
http://iahaio2010.se/uploads/press-release_bond-with-petsfinal.pdf
"The experiment found that women and their dogs experienced similar increases in oxytocin levels after ten minutes of friendly contact. Also the women's oxytocin response was significantly correlated to the quality of the bond they reported in a survey taken prior to the interacting with their pets."
Read an article about this research in Psychology Today here: Dog Good.
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