engleski

The Beginning, the End, and All the Happiness in Between: Pet Owners’ Wellbeing from Pet Acquisition to Death

The aim of this study was to provide deeper insight into relationship between pet-related life events and owner’s well-being, and to analyze context of happiness definitions comprising pets. The research was conducted online as a part of CRO-WELL project. For the purposes of this study, we selected variables: overall happiness, life satisfaction, subjective ratings of health, and occurrence and parameters (positivity, negativity, importance, anticipation) of two pet related life events: acquiring a pet and pet’s death during the previous year. Additionally, from the pool of lay people happiness definitions (N=4059) we analyzed those containing pets (N=89). Total sample consisted of 5034 participants, from whom 658 acquired a pet in the last year, 272 experienced pet’s death, and additional 221 experienced both events. Participants who experienced death of a pet during the previous year were significantly less happy and satisfied, when compared to persons who didn’t get a pet and didn’t experience pet’s death in the previous year. Overall happiness was weakly and positively related to positive evaluation and importance of getting a pet. Anticipation of pet’s death was positively related to positive evaluations of pet’s death suggesting process of adaptation took place before the pet died. Participants who attributed less importance to an event were more likely to experience positive event (getting a pet) as less positive, and negative event (pet’s death) as less negative. Participants who anticipated an event evaluated it as more positive and less negative. About 2% of participants who provided happiness definitions included pets into these definitions. Over half of them referred to the pet as the most important or equal to other family members, while for the rest it was a detail in definition. Participants referred mostly to dogs or used generic word “pet”, while cats, as the only animal named beside dogs, were mentioned in only few of the cases. Greeting owner was the most often mentioned activity, while pet’s joy and unconditional love were the most often mentioned emotions.

happiness, human –animal interaction, pet, pet loss, life events, subjective wellbeing

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