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The notion that pets can facilitate social capital goes
The notion that pets can facilitate social capital goes beyond the more commonly investigated role of pets as a social icebreaker between strangers, or as a catalyst for social interaction (Hunt, Hart, & Gomulkiewicz, 1992; McNicholas & Collis, 2000; Messent, 1983; Newby, 1997; Robins, Sanders, & Cahill, 1991; Wood, 2010). When viewed through a social capital lens for example, we are interested in whether the social interactions facilitated by pets have a wider ripple effect on social trust or the ‘ties that bind’ communities together as a civil society (Wood, 2010). Moreover, one of the hallmarks of social capital is that it HOBt can be generated and shared among people who may not be known to each other. The example of a widow living alone who benefits from the collective goodwill of neighbours in looking out for each other is one illustration of this (Kawachi, Kennedy, Lochner, & Prothrowstith, 1997).
This study set out firstly to test whether the previously observed relationship between pet ownership and social capital in our original Perth study (Wood et al., 2005) still holds true over a decade later, and in an American as well as Australian context. Secondly, this research examines the extent to which dog ownership or dog walking explains the potential nexus between pets and social capital.
Methods
Results
Discussion
Owning a pet is significantly associated with higher social capital compared with not owning a pet at all, and this positive association with social capital was not confined to dog ownership, and was consistent across residents surveyed in the three US and one Australian city. These findings thus provide important temporal and international validity to our previous study on pets and social capital undertaken in Perth Australia over a decade ago and with a much smaller sample size (Wood et al., 2005).
Given pets are entrenched in the lives and homes of many people in a growing number of countries, it is plausible that the pets and social capital nexus may prevail also in other nations, beyond the US and Australia. This is not just a social nicety or quirky sociological observation, as social capital is predictive of a raft of important social indicators (Halpern, 2005), including those pertaining to mental health, mortality, child development, crime and safety and economic resilience. Factors that erode social capital tend to be more readily identified in public policy and popular discourse, so there is novel appeal in tapping into the high rates of pet ownership that exist already in many countries as a conduit for strengthening the social fabric of local communities.
It was hypothesized that dogs and dog walking may be more likely to be related to higher social capital. This was true to some extent as, when compared with non-pet owners, those owning a dog experienced higher average social capital than those owning other pet/s. Further, dog walkers were more likely to have a higher social capital score than dog owners who reported that they did not walk their dog. The stronger associations observed for dog walkers may in part be related to the role of dog walking as a mechanism for improved natural surveillance and increased perceptions of safety within a neighborhood, both of which have implications for people’s movement within their local community (Christian et al., 2016).
Pets other than dogs were also shown in our study to precipitate conversation and interaction among neighbors, and we contend that even incidental social interactions can contribute to enhanced social capital, as people are then less likely to feel that they live amongst total strangers (Cattell, Dines, Gesler, & Curtis, 2008; Wood et al., 2005). In this study, 27% of people who owned pets other than dogs said they got to know neighbors through pets. In the analysis of qualitative responses to a question that asked respondents to elaborate on how they had met people through a pet, there were many examples that illustrated this, ranging from pets precipitating the first meeting between neighbors, pets being a topic of conversation over the fence or when out in the yard, through to children wanting to ‘meet’ a novel type of pet (Wood et al., 2015).