Couple days ago a fellow reader contacted me through the contacts page and requested an post featuring the benefits of having a dog, specifically focused on health benefits where dogs often help preventing or recovering from some human health problem.

When I read it, I thought to myself simply writing a plain simple text numbering a few of them and mail them back, but after giving it another thought, I decided to write such post for all to read and hopefully learn a thing or two by the end of it. However I won’t just focus on health benefits, I hope to be a bit more broad and include other kinds of benefits.

Moving on, dogs do bring a lot of benefits and some disadvantages to whomever has them. I don’t wish to compound the advantages versus disadvantages discussion as I believe it to be subjective to each dog and owner, therefore let us move on into what are the benefits of having a dog:

• Regularly walking and exercising your dog improves overall health and fitness levels.

• Infants who live with dogs often have lower allergenic problems in the future.

• Infants who have grown in the company of a dog are less likely to have a quite common skin allergy named eczema that causes red patches and itching.

• Petting your dog lowers blood pressure, therefore helping prevent cardiovascular problems.

• Patients who have dogs with them recover more rapidly from illness when compared with patients who don’t have dogs.

• People with dogs who suffer from an heart attack often have a higher survival rate.

• Children with dogs seems to have fewer sick days than other children.

• Companion dogs can act as an early warning for epileptic seizures.

• Dogs help children and grown people in general when recovering from traumatic events or situations.

• Dogs help reduce loneliness and feelings of depression

• Kids who own dogs tend to have higher self esteem.

• Dogs help hyperactive or aggressive children to be more calm.

• Playing with dogs usually causes a slight elevation of serotonin and dopamine hormones making people feel better and relax.

• Dogs have learned to read human body language and emotions, this made them quite good at making us feel better when we need to, raising our spirit and sense of well being.

• Dogs are probably the most intelligent and loyal domestic pet one can ever find. The news are filled with accounts of dogs who have saved their owners and other loved ones from accidents, health problems, aggression and so on. There are accounts of dogs who even after death, they still remain loyal to their owner and stay close to their grave.

• Dogs have an amazing sense of hearing and will allow them to hear things and act on them if trained. For example, one could train his dog to fetch the phone when it rings.

• Pretty much every dog who doesn’t have hearing problems can distinguish between the sound of their owner’s car and others cars on the street, many can even know who is arriving at the door just by the sound of the footsteps.

• Burglars are discouraged from making a robbery by the sound of a barking dog.

• Dogs need to be taken care off. They need food, water, exercise, playing, companionship and socialization. This could be seen as an disadvantage, however owning a dog teaches responsibility and is also a good choice when helping a couple to prepare for the undertaking of raising a child.

• Dog owners often have an easier time socializing, knowing new people, making friends and love connections.

• Guide dogs are trained to help their owners with mental or physical disabilities.

• Patients, specially children lucky to have animal assisted therapy may walk a dog, play with them, groom them. These dogs are trained to provide lots of love and caring towards people, specially children while at the same time allowing a high degree of tolerance and indulgence.

• Search and rescue dogs work in various harsh conditions like earthquakes, avalanches, explosions and others in the search of survivors. Some people train their dogs to sense an approaching earthquake and severe weather conditions like tornadoes.

• Farm dogs like herding, rounding up and guarding livestock. Farms dogs usually also make good guard dogs, friendly towards the family and children, and also are loyal companions.

• Estate guard dogs protect family and property grounds, these dogs tend to be territorial and protective by nature.

• Dogs are adorable, just watching them play is entertaining.

• There are many activities you can do with your dog. Walking on the park, going for a swim on the river, training your dog are just a few of the most rewarding and preferred activities.

As you can read, benefits of having a dog are a dime a dozen, we could go on and on and there were still be many benefits left to write. These are just the most common and preferred when people think about having a dog.