Cats and dogs are popular house pets in the United States. Roughly 35–45 percent of U.S. households own at least one dog (data from several sources varies), and a similar range of households own at least one cat. There are probably well more than 100 million Americans who have a Whiskers or Fido (with hopefully more interesting names) living in their homes, providing affection and companionship.
And an omnipresent source of danger.
When you live with these types of pets, your floors aren’t entirely your domain. There’s always a chance that your puppy will run through your legs on her way to fetch a ball, that your cat will curl up in the middle of the floor and take a nap, that either will leave a toy or food bowl somewhere other than where it is supposed to be. Foreign objects or four-legged friends hanging out by your feet can lead to stumbles, trips, and in some cases, bad falls.
That’s an obvious risk—but how much of one? It may be worse than you’d think.
In the mid-2000s, epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control realized that while these pets were “always underfoot,” in the words of the lead researcher, Dr. Judy Stevens, no one had tried to quantify the associated dangers. Dr. Stevens and team looked at emergency-room reports from 2001 to 2006. They found that, over the course of that five-year period, more than 86,000 ER visits were due to pets or pet-related causes. That’s two visits every hour, twenty-four hours a day, over five years. This number doesn’t include less serious injuries that do not require outside medical assistance, at least not immediately, suggesting that the number of everyday, commonplace incidents is significantly higher.
To make matters worse, a disproportionately high number of severe injuries befell the elderly. Most of the injuries were abrasions, contusions, or fractures, but factures were the most severe, constituting nearly 80 percent of the ER visits that resulted in subsequent hospitalization. The highest fracture rates were seen among people aged seventy-five and up. This gave pause to Dr. Harold Herzog, a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University (and a cat owner) who explores the psychological and emotional benefits of pet ownership. He told the New York Times “If we were giving a drug that had such a serious side effect, we’d consider taking that drug off the market.”
Of course, the CDC didn’t recommend anything that drastic. It did, however, suggest increasing public awareness of the dangers—who knew that this book was doing a public service?—and the situations that most likely lead to harm. Because dogs were responsible for 88 percent of the injuries, the CDC further recommended that owners make sure their canine companions receive obedience training as recommended by the American Veterinary Medical Association. The CDC did not go so far as to recommend you should get a cat instead.
Goldfish are common household pets—but there’s a very common misconception about them. Many people believe that goldfish lack a meaningful long-term memory; some say that a goldfish can only remember the past five seconds of its life. That’s not true. Their memory can recall events as far as three months in the past. They can learn to anticipate a meal if you feed them at a regular time each day, and they can be taught to recognize colors, shapes, and sounds.