Dog lovers should be pleased by a study presented last week to the American Heart Association. The study involved 76 recuperating cardiac patients divided into three groups: One group got no visits, another received only human volunteer visits, and the third was visited by humans with “therapeutic dogs.”
According to The Associated Press story, “Levels of epinephrine, a hormone the body makes under stress, dropped about 17 percent in patients visited by a person and a dog, and just 2 percent in those visited by just a person. Levels rose about 7 percent in the group that didn’t get visitors.”
This may be good news, but the study didn’t go far enough. It did not consider the role that dogs might have played in causing heart attacks by elevating personal stress levels.
Last May, we acquired Bodie, a dog of indeterminate age (6-9 months then) and indeterminate breed. Since he’s from New Mexico, we sometimes say he’s a very rare purebred Perro Mestizo. He might be a German shepherd combined with collie and a couple of other breeds, but he looks more like a coyote than anything I’ve seen on any televised kennel-club competition.
I went to 10 weeks of dog-obedience classes with him, and he now does a tolerable job of heeling.
However, he needs more exercise than he gets ambling along at my shuffling, weak-kneed, geezer pace in town, so we take him daily to some open space where he can run without a leash. In theory, a walk in our scenic countryside with an affectionate dog should reduce human stress faster than a pipeload of opium, but it doesn’t work that way.
For one thing, it’s hard to find the right place to take him. He loves to chase cars (also airplanes, rafts, bicycles, ATVs, etc.), so we need to be at least a mile from any appreciable traffic. We’ve found such a spot close to town, but we’re always worried that other local dog owners will find the same area, and then the dogs will meet and start brawling. Wading into the middle of a dogfight has never reduced my stress level.
Then there’s the fear, on every approach to our spot of federal land, that there will be a new razor-wire fence because the current administration has leased it for drilling or transferred it at a sweetheart price to some campaign contributor.
There’s also the opposite fear that local greenie do-gooders will discover the awful spectacle of people and dogs just walking around as they please on public land without benefit of marked trails, safety regulations, user fees and pooper-scooper requirements. Overnight it might become a stress-inducing zone of organized recreation.
Those are hypothetical worries. On the ground, a deer sometimes jumps up from the brush, attracting Bodie’s interest. Martha then worries that a game warden might happen by and get the wrong impression and issue a $200 ticket for allowing the harassment of wildlife. I try to point out that, even if they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Bodie was chasing a deer away from town, we have a defense which a local jury will respect. Where there are deer, there are mountain lions, and the fewer deer near town, the less chance of some 10-year-old turning into a big cat’s dinner. We are preventing tragedy.
Besides, Bodie is no hunter. He takes off after cottontails, but when they veer and hide, he keeps going for hundreds of yards, bounding over sagebrush and arroyos. He just wants an excuse to run. Still, Martha doesn’t like him to chase critters – especially cats in the house.
Such domestic disagreements certainly don’t help reduce stress and possible heart attacks. On the other hand, the dog is always glad to see me, and he never has other plans if I want to do something with him.
Plus, the daily walk is doubtless good for me. And as Martha observed, “If I told you that you had to walk in the hills for an hour every morning, you’d blow me off. If a doctor told you that, you’d find some rationalization for skipping a lot of days. But the dog doesn’t take excuses. When he starts yipping and running in circles because it’s time for his walk, you can’t ignore him.”
So maybe it works out. Exercising your dog improves your health. But he could still cause you so much stress that you end up in the hospital. But then he’ll help you recover faster.
Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
