What Men Should Know About Women & Their Dogs

Do you have a dog? If the answer is ‘yes’, and there’s also a man in your life, chances are he likes your dog, too.  A lot.

A study last year showed that while a man can be quite content if his woman doesn’t like his pet, it’s totally different when it comes to hers.

A doctoral candidate at the University of Houston polled 120 “cohabitating heterosexual couples” after talking with several girlfriends about the role their pets played in their relationships. Her conclusions focused on dogs because so few respondents owned cats or other pets.

You can read all the stats for yourself, but researcher Kristen Capuozzo sums it up for men quite well:

“If you’re going to get into a relationship with a girl who has a dog, you’d best be prepared to like that dog just as much as she does or fake it.”

Good advice. A study by Lifetime Networks in 2009 found that 1 in 10 of women pet owners have sacrificed a relationship for their pet, and more than one in four put the needs of their pet ahead of their own.

Don’t we all know that “pet” generally translates to “dog”? That same Lifetime research revealed that 7 out of 10 women between the ages of 18 and 49 own a pet, and half of those women own at least 1 dog. In 2012, Britain realized women dog owners outnumbered their male counterparts 2 to 1.

Hard to cull out women without children in studies of women and their pets, but 13% of the female respondents to Lifetime Networks said that if they were “stranded on a deserted island”, they’d prefer a pet’s companionship to that of a human being. My logic says a mother would choose her child first, so let’s hope those respondents were NotMoms. And, if there were single women in the group, well, men might want to take some lessons on relationships from the four-legged pros.