00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about how good dogs are for us, which might seem simple, but trust me, they might just be the best medicine out there. A lot of this podcast and a lot of the dog content out there, is about how we can get the best behavior out of our dogs. But the truth is that dogs are real good for us too, No dull, right, Well, did you know that? There's a hell of a lot of science to back this up? And owning a dog has so many ancillary benefits to our physical and mental health that you might not know about. Now that's okay, because I'm gonna talk about them right now. Back in February, I drove my daughters down to southern Minnesota so we could look for a few shed deer antlers and hang out with some good friends. A couple inches of fresh powder the night before pretty much killed our antler chances, but we hiked around anyway, under the reasoning that being in the woods is generally better than not being in the woods. After putting in the miles and coming away antless, we hung out with one of my best friends, his wife and their daughter, who's a couple years younger than my girls. At one point, my buddy and I got to reminiscing on some of our better shed hunts, and then we told the girls the story about how one day he found a really really nice side from an old ten pointer, figuring that Buck had probably dropped his other antler somewhere around there. We grid searched until I saw a set of times periscoping through the snowpack. Now I don't match up shed antlers very often, which was really cool, But then we realized we had a dilemma on our hands. Who gets to keep the match set. He found the first antler, but I found the second. It was on one of my dear properties. But I don't really have a huge connection to individual bucks, so we just decided, screw it, We'll each keep aside. And I'm telling you the second I said that one of my daughters goes dad. That's like a friendship necklace for dudes. Then we laughed and laughed, and then I took her phone away from her for a week to teach her a lesson on the fragility of the male ego and power dynamics that exist in all of our interactions. Just kidding. I didn't punish her for that because it was funny as hell. And we all know that laughter is the best medicine. But have you ever thought about why we laugh? Well, the best guess is that laughter evolved as a social bonding act that consolidates friendships, lessons tension, and can make us feel safe around others. There is literally a five step process that happens in our brains when we find something funny, which involves the frontal lobe first identifying the joke, and then the temporal lobe processing the meaning of it. Then the limpic system gets involved, and that's the system that regulates emotion. So it decides to let us have a little pleasure, which leads to the motor cortex inducing the physical act of laughter. And lastly, the Masolin big pathway in our brains gives us that good old dopamine hit, which essentially means we get naturally high from laughter. This reduces stress, obviously, but also promotes cardiovascular health, relieves pain, and gives your brain a boost in the form of fostering creativity, enhancing memory, and some help with problem solving. Not bad, right, Well, you know what else is universally pretty damn good for us. You guessed it, NonStop zoom meetings about quarterly profits and gross margins. Just kidding, it's dogs. They are good for us, both on the physical side and the mental health side. Now, when it comes to the former, it's pretty easy to understand why dogs get us out and about. They get us moving, and, at the risk of sounding like a fitness influencer, movement truly is medicine. Research has been done on this, and the simplest way to put it is that people who own dogs are more likely to report regular physical activity than those who don't. This goes a little deeper than that probably sounds, though, because owning a dog means you have to get up and take care of the dog. Got to feed it, roll around on the floor and play with it, let it outside, whatever. All of those little extra moves might not sound like much, but it's kind of like taking the stairs to the third floor every day when you could just take an elevator. That alone isn't going to qualify you for the CrossFit Championship games or whatever, but it's better than not doing those things. And dogs also require exercise, which means you need to get them out for a walk or a hike, or a run, or a slow bike ride, or just some training in the park where you'll be on your feet and doing something versus sitting at home and doom scrolling. This can lead to improved blood pressure, a reduction in blood sugar levels, a healthier weight, a lower chance of developing cardiovascular disease. Of course, you don't have to give a dog any exercise, and no one will throw you in the goolog for it. But if you get a dog and you don't get it exercise, you're also probably not all that likely to listen to a podcast like this. Now, this might be a chicken or the egg thing. I don't know, but I found a study that showed adults who regularly walk their dogs were less likely to be obese than their non dog owning neighbors. That same studies showed that dog owners are more likely to report a healthy diet, and just thirty minutes of light to moderate dog walking a day can help you get a better night's sleep, which is just sort of a cheat code to boosting your overall health. In case you are wondering if that's where the benefits end with dogs, it's not In addition to helping us bring home a limited roosters or maybe swim down a wounded mallard on the big water, dogs help promote better social connections, which has far reaching mental health benefits. Dog ownership has literally been linked to lowering the feelings of social isolation, which has been shown to increase a pile of risk factors that lead to bad health outcomes and even premature death. Your dog might be saving your life literally, and it doesn't end there. Dog Owners, just by being dog owners will generally interact with more dog owners in life, which means they are less likely to experience depression. If you think about that, it's sort of bonkers, but it's also true. And that's incredible. Now, for those of you out there who experience work stress, which according to the study I found effects two out of three employees, dogs can help. But sidebar here, don't you wonder who the one third of workers are who answered that survey and didn't report their job stressing them out. I mean, I'm stressing out just trying to think about who's out there not getting stressed out by work. All of those folks who said that work stresses them out. Two out of every five said they felt like their job was getting in the way of their health. Dogs at home for folks who work from home, and dogs in the office for folks like the people at meat Eater who can bring dogs in the office admit to being less stressed while having a higher employee satisfaction overall. I spent a couple of days out in Bozeman recently at the meat Eater office to film a project based all around about how badass dogs are. And one thing that I always love about going out there is that the office is full of dogs. On any given day, just making the rounds to bs and get a little work done. You might meet a pint size rescue with a severe underbite, maybe an indiscriminate mutt who kind of looks like a cross between a Corgi and a coonhound. You might meet a Golden retriever who is a lot like well every Golden retriever I've ever met, Or maybe a boxer with those hammerhead shark eyes and no concern for personal space, or a giant, almost bare size mophead type of a dog, and many many more. It's awesome and not only good for the dogs, but good for my coworkers. The presence of dogs helps us manage anxiety in the workplace. They also help us feel less alone in a world that seems to be dead set on isolating us and convincing us that we are meant to be alone and stare at screens all day long. The loneliness epidemic is real, and it seems to have found a new gear during COVID, which for some reason hasn't really seemed to lessen much, even though it's been a long time since the shelter in place orders in the lockdowns. Loneliness comes in many forms that aren't all pandemic induced, but the effects are pretty bad no matter what the catalyzing event is. We all know the mental health impact of feeling truly alone, but that also has some pretty bad physical effects that can manifest in headaches or body aches, or hypersomnia, which is pretty much the opposite of insomnia, which is another condition that loneliness can cause. Loneliness also walks hand in hand with depression, and together they can do a lot of damage. That German short hair sleeping at your feet while you work might not be the absolute cure for your lonliness, but that dog's presence is certainly working to keep the bad thoughts at pay to some extent. Research also shows that therapy dogs do exactly what we'd expect them to, which is benefit folks who are rehabbing after serious nervous system issues like strokes and seizure disorders and much more. At one point, we tried to get our Golden retriever to be a therapy dog, but she failed out of the program when she encountered a walker that someone had put cut up tennis balls on in order to make it quieter and easier to use. Lux just couldn't wrap her head around the fact that one of her favorite things in life was stuck to the bottom of some stupid contraption that a stranger was pushing around, and in her head it was a real good idea to focus solely on that and nothing else, to the point where we all just kind of realized that maybe she didn't quite have the mental horsepower for the job. Now, of course, I could and will point out the most obvious way in which dogs are good for us. They make us happy. Spending time with your dog increases the serotonin and do domine in your brain, which helps us calm down and relax, while also reducing the stress hormone cortisol. I don't know about you, but calming down and relaxing don't come all that natural to me, so I'll take it. Dogs literally help us feel more secure, relaxed, and affectionate. And not surprisingly, one of the things that I didn't really run across while digging into this topic is the bird dog or the dog training aspect of dog ownership. There's a lot of research out there on how doing hard things helps us do more hard things, makes us feel better about ourselves, and helps us become more goal oriented. All that jazz. If you can take an eight week old puppy and put in the time to have a well behaved adult dog that hunts close or maybe holds as points when things get a little western, you have done something that is bound to make you feel better about yourself and your life. I like to think of happiness as a moving target, because it's not a permanent state we can reach. It's a fleeting reward for putting in the work. Usually, owning dogs comes with plenty of stressful moments, though not all of which are self induced on our part by not training correctly. You know you got the emergency vet bills, well help just the vet bills in general, you know, chewed up TV remotes, holes dug in the yard. The time that my dog Luna ate something that didn't agree with her, and then she left a pile of poop on the floor in front of my door, so that when I woke up to her panting in my ear, I scrambled to get her outside to prevent the accident that had already happened, and I stepped in a pile of cold dog shit with my bare feet while actively sprinting down the carpeted hallway of my house. And lots of other general examples of dog ownership that point to it not always being just rainbows and butterflies. But what in life can we find it offers pure benefits without the prospect of anything negative. You might think, well, I don't know fishing or golf, but go fishing or go golfing and tell me that you're having a blast when one of your daughters wraps the second sixteen dollars whopper plopper around a branch way up in a tree where you'd have to have a healthy dose of squirrel DNA to retrieve it, or spend some time with someone who likes to golf and pay attention to how often they swear at themselves or the world at large over slicing a drive or just totally miffing a three foot putt. Maybe this is too American of a way to put it, but we have to pay taxes on everything, even if that bill is purely metaphorical. Where would we be without dogs? I don't know about you, but for me it wouldn't be great. Now. While I'm not a horse person in any real capacity, I've run across enough really good dog trainers who also happen to be really good horse trainers to understand, at least on the surface level, that the relationship there is close enough to that with which we share with our dogs. To think about one of my favorite quotes from a Cormack McCarthy novel called All the Pretty Horses, that goes like this, The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse, not only as if he'd been born to it, which he was, but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were, he would have found them anyway, would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it, and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed, for as long as it took until he came upon one, and he would have known that that was what he sought, and it would have been the main character of that book. Can no more imagine a world without horses than we can one without dogs. The sentiment is that even if one were never aware of just such an animal, those who are predisposed to a life with just such animals would suspect something was missing all along, and if they were to encounter such an animal would not be surprised. It's hard to not like that thought, and it seems pretty fitting for those of us who were either brought into this world carrying a love for retrievers or setters or hounds or whatever breed, or for those of us who maybe didn't possess it innately, but found that love of dogs through an experience later in life that unlocked in us that little key to a better life. I think the best way to sum it up is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is that any one of us who has had to put a dog down or lost a dog for any reason, has also said to ourselves that we will not go through that again. It is a requisite experience of being a dog owner, and it is that thing which tears us into little pieces and leaves us scrambling to be whole again. That is also the very thing that plants its butt down at our feet, with tail wagging and brown eyes pointed toward ours. That is also the cure for such grief. The pain of losing a dog cuts deep, but it's like the swipe of a sword, a huge act that brings us to our knees. But it's the way too quiet house afterwards, and the empty passenger seat as we drive past a neighborhood park, which represents the far more damaging, slow sawing motion that cuts us far deeper. It is in that space, after losing a dog that we realize we are protecting ourselves from overwhelming grief. But in that act, we are also keeping ourselves from the overwhelming joy of just having a good dog at our side for a decade or more. I don't know how to put it any other way. I also don't know how to say what I have to say now, other than just to get it out. This is the last episode of Houndations. We have our site set here on many things unrelated to dogs, and this is just it for this show. I'm still filming as much dog stuff as I can, and we'll still write some articles for the site on dogs, and we'll keep asking the c suite folks what we can do to keep ourselves tethered to the world of working dogs. Now, with all that said, in true Tony fashion, I want to ask you to do me a favor. I want you to absolutely, without question and not let the folks know that you're disappointed in this show. Ending definitely do not go to the Meat Eater site and send in an email to say that you are a dog lover and that you wish we covered more dog stuff. And if you have enjoyed this show, do not let them know that you like it and you're going to miss it. So, my friends, I just want to say thank you. Truly. There are no people who I am more likely to instantly like them my fellow dog lovers, and your support for this show has been incredible, So truly thank you for that. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been The Fundation's podcast. If you want to keep up with my dog work, or just learn a thing or two about hunting or fishing, or maybe just find a new podcast to listen to on your commute to and from work. Head on over to the meeteater dot com. We drop new podcasts, films, and articles weekly, so go check it out and once again, thank you so much for your support. He took the TUCTIC for in US in toky