A new study claims we’ve gotten it wrong all these years, that pet cats and dogs aren’t good for young children, while kids who grow up with pet fish, turtles and hamsters learn empathy and develop better mental balance.
The authors of the study claim cats are “the only common pet linked to more mental health problems in children.”
Furthermore, the authors claim, pets like turtles, fish and hamsters are “linked to” positive mental health in children, while data shows dogs have no effect.
To understand what we’re dealing with here, we’ve got to break down “study,” “linked to” and “data” in relation to the report by researchers at the University of Valencia in Spain.
“Study” here means a meta-analysis of data collected by the INMA Project, a collaboration of universities, biomedical institutes and medical conglomerates in Spain. INMA is primarily concerned with researching the impact of environmental pollutants on early childhood development.
The INMA data was not collected specifically for this new study dealing with pets.
Secondly, while INMA did “track” some 1,900 participants from birth through six or seven years old, the “data” itself primarily consists of subjective reports by the parents of the children along with “environmental measurements and clinical tests.”
It’s not clear if the original data collection effort had anything to do with the presence of pets in the homes, or if that was just one of many data points gathered in a larger assessment. For example, the INMA questionnaires may have simply asked if the families have pets and what kind of pets they have without any further elaboration or information about whether, or how often, the children interact with the pets. There can be enormous variation in that area alone.
Then there’s “linked to,” a very specific choice of words by the authors. They’re using “linked to” instead of “caused by” because the data they have – if you can appropriately use the word data to describe the results of self-reported questionnaires based on subjective feelings – cannot distinguish between correlation and causation and really says nothing at all except certain animals were present in the homes of young children.
In all, 8.7 percent of the children lived in homes with a cat, which works out to a sample size of 165, all from Spain.
So we’re already on really shaky ground here. I don’t think there’s any real scientific value in information that comes from questionnaires distributed to parents, and certainly not when it comes to topics like mental health and behavioral problems.
The definition of bad behavior varies widely between parents in different families and even mothers and fathers in the same family. Was there a baseline? Did the participants receive instructions on how to describe their assessments so they’d at least roughly resemble uniform reports? Were there other commonalities among the children who lived in homes with cats? We don’t know the answers to these questions.
What we do know is that, putting all other concerns aside, the report claims that 165 children live in homes that have cats, or had cats at one time, and some of them have varying degrees of behavioral problems.
That the conclusions are vaporous becomes even more obvious when the authors go on to speculate, with no data, why children who live with, or previously lived with, cats are allegedly more likely to suffer behavioral issues.
They repeat common misconceptions about felines being aloof, claiming the nature of cats “limits emotional bonding” compared to other companion animals.
“Having fish, turtles and hamsters on a constant basis does seem to protect children from mental health problems,” the authors concluded, although again the reasons are pure guesswork.
I’m not sure how anyone can say feline behavior “limits emotional bonding,” then in the very next paragraph claim fish and turtles, animals with which there can be very little or no real interaction, “protect” kids from mental health issues. Not even “help protect,” but full on “protect.”
The authors also point to a common boogeyman, toxoplasma gondii. The parasite can be transmitted to humans dozens and potentially hundreds of different ways, including contaminated water and undercooked meat, but cats are blamed because they’re easily infected by it and can pass it to humans.
To be clear, toxoplasma gondii does not figure anywhere in the data and the researchers did not test the children for infection.
But the bit that sets off the most alarm bells in my mind is the claim that dogs have no impact on the mental health of children.
That should have immediately prompted the research team to go back and figure out where their analysis went funky.
There are so many studies linking cats and dogs, and especially dogs, to tangible improvements in mental health and mood that anyone who claims the opposite has a lot of work ahead of them to demonstrate why their findings are accurate and the abundance of studies that concluded the opposite are flawed. (Dogs are better studied than cats because they’re easier to control, so the abundance of studies on dogs shouldn’t be confused for a stronger impact on human health.)
Whenever I write something like this, I always worry I’m contributing to the anti-science positions of some people who view the entirety of science with suspicion.
Science is nothing more than a formal process for learning about the natural world. It doesn’t have an agenda. It’s important for us to separate our qualms with the methods and standards of particular studies from the idea of science itself. A study may be flawed, but the scientific method remains the best, most time-honored way to expand human knowledge we’ve managed to come up with.
There are also major differences between “soft” sciences like psychology and hard sciences like physics and chemistry. The latter are primarily black and white, true or untrue, while the former deal with uncountable shades in between. It’s hard to quantify human feelings, thoughts and behaviors.
I’m sure the researchers involved in this project mean well, but unless we begin to see other studies placing fish, turtles and hamsters atop the pet hierarchy for their impact on mental health, I think we can file it as an anomaly and move on.
Pain In The Bud 