Pets mean more to us than health and independence

Pets have at least 36 distinct meanings to older people, a new NSA research report has shown.  

The finding was based on responses to the 2024 National Seniors Social Survey (NSSS) and was published in the international peer-reviewed journal Anthrozoös. 

The survey had invited participants with pets to “tell us about them and what they mean to you”, and 1,615 of the 5,106 participants wrote a comment doing so. 

Our analysis of the comments boiled them down to the whopping 36 themes, which you can see summarised in the accompanying image.

The themes include several new ones that researchers haven’t written about before.

Ours is a very large study compared with other qualitative research about pets and older people, which may be why we were able to detect so many themes among the comments. 

We invited University of Melbourne anthropologist, Dr Rachel Morgain, to co-author the paper with us because of her expertise on how anthropologists theorise relationships between humans and non-human animals. 

Pets’ meanings for health and independence 

The 36 meanings we detected among the 1,615 comments include pet benefits you might expect, such as encouraging us to exercise, facilitating social encounters with our fellow humans, or relieving our loneliness with companionship (you can see these underlined theme names in the diagram). 

The themes also included downsides such as the cost and effort of pet care, or concern about what will happen to pets after we die or if we have to move and can’t take them with us. 

Previous research about older people and pets has tended to focus on these very practical aspects of how pets can benefit or hinder their owners’ health and independence.  

The presence of these meanings in our dataset confirmed that our research was on the right track because it reproduced themes other researchers had already described. 

However, previous researchers have tended to stop at this rather narrow set of concepts when considering pets’ meanings. 

In reality, we older people are complex human beings and pets mean more than that to us. 

Ethics and altruism have meaning too 

Our survey results showed that older people find meaning in other aspects of pet ownership, too – aspects that previous researchers haven’t identified as meaningful for us. 

Three of the new meanings of pets we identified were each mentioned by over 100 respondents, suggesting a high level of importance to older people. 

These became the focus of our paper because of their novelty in the research world. 

The first, which we labelled shelter, included 154 comments about adopting rescue pets, looking after strays, or getting involved in other animal welfare activities.  

Example comments included:

But it isn’t just pets who need help.

The second meaning we identified, named community, came from 129 comments about altruistically caring for other people’s pets or sharing care among different households.  

Comments included:

These kinds of ethical and altruistic meanings of pets haven’t rated as important in the research world before.

A few researchers have mentioned in passing if an older person has a rescue pet, but they haven’t attributed any special meaning to this. 

Yet the number of times such scenarios were mentioned by NSSS respondents shows they are a big deal for many older Australians. 

It’s clear from comments that adopting a rescue, taking on a loved one’s pet, or sharing care of an animal is a matter of pride and principle to many of us and represents a meaningful way of making the world a better place.

Wondering at the universe 

Personality was the third novel meaning we identified, based on 169 comments in which people described their pet’s unique characteristics and personality traits, just as they might describe a human. 

Comments of this sort included:

Many pet owners make comments like this all the time in everyday life or use other adjectives to describe them (“beautiful”, “smart”, “anxious”), but researchers have not previously highlighted this as important to older people.

Yet appreciating and wondering at an animal’s unique traits and personality quirks is a meaningful part of life for many of us. 

Our pets aren’t “just a pet” – they are living beings with whom we share a life. They are both different and similar to us and this makes them endlessly interesting and wondrous. 

Other anthropological research tells us altruistic attitudes and self-transcendent appreciation of the world around us contribute to human beings’ life-satisfaction and general wellbeing. 

This applies to older people as much as to anyone else. 

The role of pets in promoting these less discussed aspects of later-life wellbeing has to be considered when thinking about how our society supports older Australians – whether through government policies on housing, aged care, income support, or anything else. 

For example, our survey participants in past years have often called for pet-friendly policies in retirement living and aged-care homes. 

Our wellbeing isn’t just about physical fitness, relief from loneliness, and money in the bank.