ainhoa

Acquiring a pet increases life satisfaction by 3 to 4 points on a scale of 1 to 7, which equates to a material value of £70,000 a year. There is substantial evidence from psychology and medicine that pets are associated with better health and higher life satisfaction of their human companions. Yet whether this relationship is causal or purely a correlation remains largely unknown. Determining a causal relationship is difficult because there is potentially reverse causality. The relatively few randomized control trials and experiments that have been performed tend to involve small sample sizes and inconclusive results. We use an instrumental variable approach to overcome this, specifically exploiting relationships in which neighbours ask individuals to look over their property when traveling, which is correlated with pet companionship. This is something that to our knowledge has not been done before. We control for baseline relationships with neighbours as well as various other potential sources of bias. Using the Innovation Panel as part of the UK Household Longitudinal Survey, we find that a pet companion increases life satisfaction by 3 to 4 points on a scale of 1 to 7. Moreover, we estimate the size of the impact of pets on human life satisfaction and wellbeing in monetary units. We find that having a pet companion is worth up to £70,000 a year in terms of life satisfaction, similar to values obtained in the literature for meeting with friends and relatives on a regular basis. The results in the present study bring strong support for the hypothesis that pets increase human life satisfaction and wellbeing similarly to family and friends and that, to some extent, they are even a substitute for these. The value of pets for their human caregivers appears to be very high, comparable to the one that has been obtained in other studies for meeting with friends and relatives on a regular basis or even with being married.