A new study shows that the presence of pets in the home might reduce the risk of food allergies in children, following older research on our four-legged friends’ ability to reduce respiratory allergies, too.
According to UPI, “Japanese investigators found that young children exposed to dogs in the home were less likely to experience egg, milk and nut allergies.” Households with children and cats (cats aren’t *just* the domain of single women) were “less likely to be diagnosed with egg, wheat and soybean allergies.”
To which I say: So what!
I’m not dismissing the seriousness of food or respiratory allergies. They’re aggravating at the very least and debilitating or even deadly in the more extreme cases. And the food allergy thing seems to be getting worse. If Boomers or GenX had peanut allergies the way Millennials and Zoomers do, our school cafeterias would have been littered with corpses, and the school parking lot crowded with ambulances.
All of us put peanut butter on pretty much everything, and we liked it.
But I digress.
The night I met the future Mrs. VodkaPundit — very romantic, I picked her up in a bar — we were having drinks and laughs and getting to know each other much faster than you’d expect from a bar pick-up. Until her face got serious before she asked me, “Are you a dog person or a cat person?”
“It’s complicated,” I said, honestly not trying to hedge. She gave me a dubious look that let me know our future together hinged on my answer. “I have a cat now because I’m single and take roadtrips and stuff. But when I have a family, I’ll have dogs.”
“Besides,” I added, “my cat Dingo thinks he’s a dog. He drools and fetches. Seriously.”
Apparently that was a good enough answer, because we’ve been together ever since that night.
ASIDE: Dingo was short for Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián d’Anconia Green, named after the Atlas Shrugged character because they both had black hair and an attitude problem. I had to shorten his name to Dingo instead of Frisco because I didn’t want to correct countless assumptions that I’d given him the same horrible nickname as the city I used to live in.
We got married 18 months later, bought a house a few months after that, and then got our first dog — a Golden named Xander. That’s Xander Harris Green, named for the sweet-but-not-too-bright character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I still had Dingo. Before long our menagerie was made up of one dog, one cat, one baby, and zero allergies.
Since then we lost Dingo to old age and Xander to cancer. We’ve added another Golden (Ty, short for James Tiberius Kirk Green) and two rescues — Remy, the beautiful girl with the cognac eyes, and Chewie the Perma-Pup. There was another cat in between but we had to give him away. He’d announce his food bowl was empty by randomly slicing open one of my children. I think I’m done with cats after that one. Maybe naming him Khaaaaaaaan was a mistake.
We now have two kids, three dogs, and still zero allergies — but so much love.
If you’ve ever watched young kids and dogs together, you know what it is to witness magic.
What children learn from dogs and, I suppose, even from non-psychotic cats, is to receive unconditional love and care from someone who isn’t mom or dad, and give that love and care right back. Nobody who ever helped raise a puppy into a good boy or girl ever grew up to become a serial killer.
And pets help with allergies? That’s just icing on a cake that probably has a few dog hairs stuck on it.
Speaking all too personally, no matter how screwed up things got when I was a kid, we always had pets. Their presence and affection were things I could rely on, even as the rest of my young life was getting the rug pulled out from under it, repeatedly.
So is it news that pets are good for your kids? Of course not. But it sometimes takes science a while longer to reveal what the heart already knows.
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