Animals
It’s Official! Kids Who Grow Up With Pets Make More Sensitive, Sympathetic, Successful Adults
For children, having an animal friend can lead to a greater quality of life further down the road.
(TMU) — For those of us who’ve had our lives enriched with new additions to our families—be they our children or new animal companions—it should come as no surprise that the benefits are myriad.
And for parents, while it may seem like too much work to bring a pet into the family—be it a cat, dog, guinea pig, or fish—the long-term gains of such a decision can far outweigh the costs.
In fact, studies have shown that children who grow up with pets often enjoy a major boost in terms of Emotional Intelligence or EQ, which can lead to better academic success not to mention an enhanced sense of responsibility, empathy, and a knowledge of the cycle of life that can equip children with a huge leg-up in life skills. As the Washington Post writes, “more than intelligence, EQ is the best indicator of a child’s likely success in school.”
And while children’s Intelligence Quotient, or IQ, is believed by experts to be unchangeable, one’s EQ can improve with practice. For children, having an animal friend can provide a great head-start to developing their EQ—which, in turn, can pay dividends in terms of our kids enjoying a greater quality of life further down the road.
Here are just a few of the EQ skills developed by children with pets:
1. Empathy
Children with pets have an opportunity to learn some important lessons. In an overview of scientific studies on the subject, Nienke Endenburg and Ben Baarda wrote:
“If there are pets in the house, parents and children frequently share in taking care of the pet, which suggests that youngsters learn at an early age how to care for and nurture a dependent animal.”
Even children who are extremely young are capable of helping to care for and feed their pets, whether in tasks as simple as bringing them food or learning how to physically interact with their pets in a sensitive manner. And while children may require supervision in their first few pet interactions, these formative lessons in compassion, consent, and thinking about life beyond themselves can be crucial in terms of teaching some basics on empathy that apply to animals and humans alike.
2. Self-Esteem
Caring for animals offers a hefty set of responsibilities, whether it’s in respect to tasks as mundane as filling a water bowl or achievements as major as teaching your dog a new skill. For children, performing these tasks can lead to a sense of personal fulfillment, competence, and independence. As Endenburg and Baarda wrote:
“[A researcher] found that children’s self-esteem scores increased significantly over a nine-month period of keeping pets in their school classroom. In particular, it was children with originally low self-esteem scores who showed the greatest improvements.”
3. Cognitive Development
Spending time with pets can be extremely rewarding from a practical standpoint, whether in terms of acquiring linguistic skills or improving oral competency. Many children even love to conduct “story time” with their pets, reading aloud to their cats or dogs. As researchers explain:
“Pet ownership might facilitate language acquisition and enhance verbal skills in children. This would occur as a result of the pet functioning both as a patient recipient of the young child’s babble and as an attractive verbal stimulus, eliciting communication from the child in the form of praise, orders, encouragement and punishment.”
4. Stress Reduction
Animals can provide unmatched emotional support, weakening negative feelings and providing positivity like no other. In fact, researchers found that many children make a bee-line for their pets whenever they are stressed. For kids and adults alike, our pets provide a source of unconditional love and support. As we know well, us complicated humans can often muck up a situation with criticism, judgmental attitudes, and sarcasm—something our animal friends are never capable of.
5. A Keen Understanding of the ‘Cycle of Life’
For too many families, a discussion of concepts like birth and death is a real challenge that often doesn’t come until the death of a loved one—be it a child’s grandparent, an elderly relative, or a family friend. And with such losses come major pain and even life-altering trauma. However, children with pets can often learn important early lessons on the difficulties of life and inexorable nature of death. Endenburg and Baarda explained:
“The way in which their parents and others near to them deal with the situation will have an influence on how children cope with death in general throughout their lives.
At the other end of an animal’s life is birth. For most children the birth of animals is an exciting moment that can give parents the opportunity to explain how life begins and can form part of sex education.”
While every family has its own unique structure, demands, and needs—not to mention hereditary and genetic factors—a pet can serve as a major resource for children, especially youngest siblings and only children.
And it’s important to note that while these benefits can be powerful in people’s earliest stages of development, many of the above concepts apply equally to adults as well.
If any of the above concepts sound familiar to adult readers, that’s because some of the same benefits are relevant for grown-ups too, including the social support and stress reduction.
By Elias Marat | Creative Commons | TheMindUnleashed.com
Idaho’s legislature is swiftly moving forward with a bill that critics say would sanction a “brutal war” on wolves whereby up to 90 percent of the current wolf population would be killed in a bid to protect the interests of the state’s ranchers.
On Wednesday, the Idaho senate passed the measure by a 26-7 vote. The bill will now move forward to the House chamber, reports Associated Press.
Since teetering at the brink of endangerment years ago, wolf populations were removed from the state endangered species list in 2011. Since then, they have thrived despite Idaho allowing hundreds to be killed by hunters, trappers and state measures to control their numbers. Over the past two years, the wolf population has held steady at about 1,500.
According to federal guidelines, wolf recovery numbers require about 150 wolves in the state.
Republican supporters of the bill said during senate debates that the wolf population has grown entirely out of control, endangering the numbers of deer and elk available to hunters and harming the state economy.
“We’re supposed to have 15 packs, 150 wolves. We’re up to 1,553, was the last count, 1,556, something like that. They’re destroying ranchers. They’re destroying wildlife. This is a needed bill,” said Republican state Sen. Mark Harris.
However, critics have blasted the move as rash and potentially damaging to the state’s wildlife.
“The Idaho Senate’s sudden move to pass this bill in the eleventh hour incentivizes the cruel deaths of more than 1,000 wolves across the state,” said Andrea Zaccardi, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“This brutal war on wolves must be stopped, and we urge the House to deny this bill,” Zaccardi added.
Maggie Howell, the head of the Wolf Conservation Center, also described the move as the latest in a hostile and extreme campaign against wolves that fails to take into account the creatures’ value to the local ecology.
“Beyond the wanton cruelty and devastation the passage of this bill would bring to wolves, this legislation poses a threat to wolves nationwide,” she told the New York Times. “With the Trump administration’s decision to transfer wolf management authority from the federal government to the states, Idaho’s policies can influence expectations about wildlife management beyond its borders.”
The waters surrounding the equator are one of the most biodiverse areas in the globe, with the tropical area rich in marine life including rare sea turtles, whale sharks, manta rays, and other creatures.
However, rampant rises in temperate have led to a mass exodus of marine species from the sensitive region – with grave implications for life on earth.
While ecologists have long seen the thriving biodiversity of equatorial species holding constant in the past few centuries, a new study by Australian researchers published in The Conversation has found that warming global temperatures are now hitting the equator hard, potentially leading to an unprecedented mass extinction event.
The researchers from the Universities of Auckland, Queensland, and the Sunshine Coast found that as waters surrounding the equator continue to heat up, the ecosystem is being disrupted and forcing species to flee toward the cooler water of the South and North Pole.
The massive changes in marine ecosystems that this entails will have a grave impact not only on ocean life – essentially becoming invasive species in their new homes – but also on the human livelihoods that depend on it.
“When the same thing happened 252 million years ago, 90 percent of all marine species died,” the researchers wrote.
To see where marine life is headed, the researchers tracked the distribution of about 49,000 different species to see what their trajectory was. The global distribution of ocean life typically resembles a bell curve, with far fewer species near the poles and more near the equator.
However, the vast alteration of the curve is already in motion as creatures flee to the poles, according to a study they published in the journal PNAS.
These changes augur major disruptions to global ecosystem as marine life scrambles in a chaotic fight for food, space, and resources – with a mass die-off and extinction of creatures likely resulting.
The research underscores the dire need for human societies to control rampant climate change before the biodiversity and ecological health of the planet is pushed past the point of no return.
Advances in the methods used by researchers to watch wildlife have allowed for the photographing of a rare creature whose image had never been captured in the wild before.
Researchers in the West African nation of Togo were able to spot the rare Walter’s duiker, a rare species of petite African antelope, for the first time in the wild thanks to camera traps equipped with motion sensors.
In addition to the Walter’s duiker, the camera traps were also able to discover rare species of aardvarks and a mongoose, reports Gizmodo.
At a time when the extinction of entire species is becoming more common worldwide, such devices should help conservationists not only preserve creatures sought by bushmeat hunters but also spot rare animals whose presence is elusive for human observers. In the past, biologists were forced to rely on the same hunters for information.
“Camera traps are a game changer when it comes to biodiversity survey fieldwork,” said University of Oxford wildlife biologist Neil D’Cruze.
“I’ve spent weeks roughing it in tropical forests seemingly devoid of any large mammal species,” D’Cruze continued. “Yet when you fire up the laptop and stick in the memory card from camera traps that have been sitting there patiently during the entire trip—and see species that were there with you the entire time —it’s like being given a glimpse into a parallel world.”
The Walter’s duiker was discovered in 2010 when specimens of bushmeat were compared to other duiker specimens. The new images of the creature are the first to have been seen.
Rare species like Walter’s duiker are often not listed as “endangered” by groups like the International Union for Conservation of Nature due to a lack of data.
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