‘Dog People’ Less Likely to Be Lonely in Lockdowns

A study has found that dog owners cope better with loneliness. Cynthia Smith/Unsplash

Australian research has discovered that dog owners tend to have different personality traits from cat owners and that the former tended to cope better with loneliness during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Researchers at James Cook University surveyed 534 lone dwellers in Australia who were dog owners, cat owners, and those without pets during the second lockdown period, one of the strictest and most restrictive in the world.

For those in COVID-19 lockdowns, they found that both dog and cat ownership made the isolation easier and provided companionship for people living alone, psychologist Jessica Oliva said.

Due to their increased mindfulness, dog owners, in particular, were found to be less lonely.

Mindfulness is the ability to keep the mind attending to what is occurring in the present moment and calmly acknowledging and accepting feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.

Personality Traits a Bigger Factor

Oliva found that this was probably not due to the pet, but the owner’s character traits.

“It’s possible the lower levels of loneliness observed in dog owners is more related to the type of personality associated with being a person who owns a dog than the dogs themselves,” she said.

She found that ‘dog people’ were completely different from ‘cat people’ in the Big Five personality traits, and so it is possible that dog owners are more hardy and quick to recover from forced social isolation and separation from loved ones.

The Big Five personality traits include openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

“The association between higher levels of mindfulness and lower levels of loneliness are consistent with previous research that suggests that mindfulness alleviates or prevents loneliness,” Oliva said.

“A significant relationship was also seen between increased mindfulness and decreased loneliness.”

Andrew Stuart wears a bandana as a mask while taking a selfie with his dog, Voltron, on Sunset Blvd, in West Hollywood, Calif., on July 2, 2020. Ashley Landis/AP Photo

“This means that efforts to find ways to increase the state of mindfulness during social isolation are important.”

Australia’s ‘short, sharp’ COVID-19 lockdowns became the longest in the world. Melbourne, the second-largest city, spent 267 days or 45 percent of the time, in lockdown since the CCP virus pandemic was declared on March 13, 2020.

The number of Australians owning pets surged by 10 percent during the pandemic, according to Animal Medicines Australia, with nearly half of all households having at least one dog.