How our emotions affect our animals

Various everyday situations affect us and condition the welfare of our pets

A dog owner and her Standard Poodle attend the third day of the Crufts Dog Show in Birmingham, Britain, March 12, 2022. REUTERS/Molly Darlington

Everything that happens to the dog influences the human being who accompanies him and everything that happens to the human being influences his dog.

The bond that is generated between the human and his dog, contains in itself everyday emotions and these bidirectionally affect both ends of that duet.

Improving the quality of this unique bond helps novel multispecies families to enrich and balance their relationships.

There is an interspecies emotional empathy, which generates something like the contagion of emotions based on the action of neurons called mirror neurons, which are responsible for us being able to “put ourselves in the place of the other”, something that animals also have and therefore can feel that feeling in the same way.

We can empathize with the feelings of our animals and they with us, so that our emotions affect them and feel them as our own.

The emotional state is directly related to physical health and is an indissoluble unit between body, mind and emotions, ours and those of our animals.

Our own enjoyment and in the company of our animals charges us with harmony and optimal health, filling our bloodstream with endorphins, substances that counteract the deleterious compounds that arise from stress, such as cortisol, which predispose to chronic inflammatory diseases.

The living animals will mimic these feelings and their negative or positive consequences, given the emotional synchronization between the dog and the human being.

Just by looking into your dog's eyes, in an act of love, they will both release endorphins, prolactin and oxytocin, all anti-stress and health-beneficial hormones.

In this way, the bond is strengthened, consequently the immune system and all the physiological processes of the multispecies family, which is a single family, where the health of one depends on the other by the empathization of love.

*Prof. Dr. Juan Enrique Romero @drromerook is a veterinary physician. Specialist in University Education. Master's Degree in Psychoimmunoneuroendocrinology. Former Director of the Small Animal School Hospital (UNLPAM). University Professor at several Argentine universities. International lecturer.

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