 Thanks for joining us today for the final installment of the CLSA webinar series for 2016, Aging in Place with Pets is pet ownership relevant to social participation and life satisfaction for older adults in Canada. I'm Laura Lawson, communications manager for the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. Before I introduce our presenter, I just want to share a few reminders about today's presentation. The webinar will run for one hour with an opportunity to ask questions, with an opportunity for questions at the end of the presentation. You have a question, you can enter it in the chat window in the bottom right of the WebEx window at any point during the session. Be sure to select all participants from the drop-down menu. Questions are visible to all attendees and this presentation is recorded and will be posted to the CLSA website. So welcome to our presenter and to me is a doctoral candidate in the population and public health stream of the University of Calgary's department of community health services. With a focus on gerontology and human animal studies, Anne's doctoral research program explores older adults experience of aging in place with companion animals. Using a case study approach, her research seeks to understand contextual influences on the qualities of relationships older adults share with pets and how these may be shaped by individual circumstances as well as by structural factors. She considers the perspectives of both older adults and community providers while also drawing upon data from a nationally representative longitudinal cohort study, the Canadian longitudinal study on aging. She frames her findings in relation to aging in place policies, population health, and public health ethics. Okay, and now I will turn it over to Anne. Thank you for joining us. Hi, everybody. First, thank you Laura for the very kind introduction and I'd also just like to thank everybody who has been able to join the webinar today. I'm really pleased to be able to share with you some of my research specifically looking at aging in place with pets and exploring whether pet ownership is relevant to social participation and life satisfaction for older adults in Canada. I'm just going to give you a bit of insight into the way that I've organized my presentation today. I'm going to start by giving you some background into the study of aging in place with pets. After I've done that I'll give you a sense for how my dissertation fits into this area. I'll move into specifically the CLSA analysis that I've conducted on social participation in pets. And finally I'll spend a few minutes talking about some of the implications that I feel that these findings may have as we think about promoting age-friendly cities. And just before I move on I also wanted to say a couple of words about language conventions because I realized that I have quite a broad audience here listening in today. And so those of you who are familiar with the human animal studies literature will know that terms like companion animals versus pets or guardian versus pet owner are often used. But today throughout my presentation I am going to stick with the more conventional terms of pet and of owner. I'm doing this partly because I think it's just practical for communicating with a broader audience. But this terminology is also aligned with CLSA wording in their questionnaire. And it's also the dominant language around the responsible pet ownership municipal policies and practices. And so I just wanted to acknowledge that there is other terminology that is often used in this area of study. I also want to start by highlighting a specific case that happened in Calgary during the summer of August 2015. And here you can see national post coverage of a headline that says I'm not getting rid of my kitty. Calgary senior chooses homelessness over giving up kitten. And by way of the backstory behind this headline this photo shows an older long time tenant who had moved into an affordable apartment with puppies some years back or a dog. The dog had died and eventually she really wanted to add another companion animal to her life. So she adopted a kitten but she hadn't realized that in the meantime her apartment had adopted a no pets policy. So essentially she was asked to get rid of her kitten or else vacate the premises which is ultimately what she chose to do. And so just kind of thinking about the situation if we find that some older people who are otherwise capable of caring for and providing a good home for an animal need to choose between housing and pets well what else can we learn more broadly about the ways that we're currently promoting aging in place. So just thinking about that. I also want to introduce to you a theoretical framework that's been proposed for ways that relationships with pets may influence the health of people. And so looking at this diagram a common factor might be as an example having a higher socio-economic status. So we know that having a higher socio-economic status tends to lead to having a better mental physical health and it might also be a factor that determines one's decision to have a pet. So we see these things both working in tandem. The indirect effect of pet ownership could be something like dog walking. So a person has a dog as they walk a dog they have social interactions with others and they're physically active and both of these things together might help to support health. And then the third proposed pathway is the direct effect of pet ownership and this would be something like some researchers have found that older adults experience reduced blood pressure when they're petting a patch a familiar pet. Now while sorry in reality all three of these factors are probably at play. For the purposes of managing the scope of my analysis today I'm going to be focusing in particular on this indirect effect as we think about matters of social isolation versus social participation as we think about companionship versus loneliness and in particularly as we consider aging in place. I also wanted to let you know that we know that over a third of older Canadians who are over the age of 65 years report living with a household pet that offers companionship companionship. So that's quite a substantial proportion of our aging population. And I'm going to spend a few minutes giving you an overview about what current research tells us about aging in place. And I do just want to mention that while I'm not going to touch on it today I have included a suggested reading list at the end of my slide presentation. So those of you who are interested in reading more of the evidence that I'm presenting today you can either download the presentation from the CLSA or you're welcome to contact me directly as well. Not surprisingly there's a fairly robust evidence that suggests that for older adults there are many benefits to pet ownership and some of these might include the observation that pets may contribute to maintaining physical function as people age. So maintaining their abilities to go through their activities of daily living. Not surprisingly they may provide companionship and a sense of purpose. And also as I mentioned earlier dogs in particular but cats as well can help to facilitate social interactions and even lead to a heightened sense of community. So these are all positive things as we think about aging in place. But it's also important to highlight that there are contradictory and counterintuitive or even surprising findings. So for instance there are a number of studies that have shown that older adults with pets may actually be lonelier than non-pet owners or less satisfied with life or show various other indications of just having poorer mental health. But at the same time those researchers who have drilled a little bit deeper and investigated mechanisms that are happening have also found that in some situations having a pet can also buffer some of the negative consequences of experiencing things like loneliness or of having lower levels of support. In particular attachment to pets has been explored as one of the keys to understanding why for some people pets seem to have this relationship with healthier successful aging. And in fact some older adults have even credited their pets with contributing to their own successful aging. So if we think about this idea of attachment we tend to be focusing on the individual level and really trying to understand that there's something about the quality of relationships. And this has captivated the attention of researchers in this area. But at the same time the focus on attachment has led to certain critiques of pets for older adults. And this has included a concern with extreme attachments that play out in fact to the detriment of participating in social life and of neglecting self-care. So again these critiques have tended to focus on individual level factors so things like attachment. But to date there are not a lot of researchers who have really considered how structural or systemic factors that shape individual situations might also be playing out. In terms of my underlying rationale as I've put forward there are very few studies that have sought to understand pets in relation to the ways that we actively promote aging in place. And in this slide I do highlight the Global Age Friendly Cities Guide which has shaped a lot of efforts around the world to start to think through ways that we can make our cities and communities more age friendly. So in essence there seems to be a real absence of social ecological approaches to understanding pets and aging in place. And these are approaches that consider influences that lie outside of the individual characteristics and ways that these external influences are also shaping the quality of relationships and may have implications in relation to aging in place. And on top of that there's very little research that I'm aware of that has tried to more empirically the extent to which levels of social participation may also be reduced for some older pet owners. And so just my interest in social participation really does stem from the WHO Age Friendly Cities Guide. And in this guide social participation is highlighted as one of the key elements for promoting age friendly cities. So within the guide social participation is defined as being engaged with social recreational and other types of activities that involve people. And these activities will generally be taking place outside of one's own home. And as we heard for those of you who are able to attend the last CLSA webinar that was presented by Nancy Newell and Verena Menek, social participation is viewed as almost an anecdote to social isolation or we can conceive of the two sitting at opposite ends of a continuum with social isolation at one end and social participation at the other end. And finally this brings me to my own research which is a mixed methods case study of aging in place with pets in my city which is Calgary and a city that's regarded as a particularly pet friendly city. And so as you can see I have three different components of my case study although today I'm going to focus specifically on the CLSA analysis that I've done. And for my case study I just wanted to take a moment to share what my main theoretical proposition is which is that pets may play an especially pivotal role in the lives of older adults who are socially isolated and especially those who are living in lower income circumstances. But at the same time these are the very older adults who also might face the most challenges in terms of having pets and these challenges may also be compounding their susceptibility to experiencing worse mental and physical health. And I also just want to note that older adults living in these types of more marginalized circumstances their experiences are often also virtually absent from the literature on pets and aging. So with that in mind I'm going to move now into describing for you the CLSA component of my study. And essentially I had two objectives. The first is to describe the baseline characteristics of older Canadian pet owners and non-owners and this is using the first wave the CLSA tracking cohort. In terms of my second objective it was to explore various measures of social participation and life satisfaction for the older Canadian adults who participated in this the tracking cohort and to consider whether and how these differ for pet owners versus non-owners. So once again the CLSA component really offered me an opportunity to explore outcomes that are directly related to some of the age friendly frameworks such as the WHO work that I've highlighted. And the second objective in particular will allow for a social ecological interpretation that I think is relevant to the epidemiology of aging in place with pets but also is very relevant to thinking through policy approaches to promoting aging in place. And just a little bit of background into the CLSA tracking cohort for those of you who aren't familiar with it. The cohort involved a random sample of community dwelling adults who are residing in Canada that I am looking specifically at the group who are 65 years or older at the baseline. The data was collected via telephone interviews between September 2011 and May 2014 and the sampling was representative sampling of the different provinces across Canada. Some of the other inclusion criteria included being fluent in English or French and of course as we see with these types of studies the respondents needed to have a published telephone number and finally the interviewers were trained to identify the possibility of cognitive impairment and so if they detected this those respondents would not have been included in this cohort. In terms of the key variables that I was interested in was social participation and there were three particular dimensions of social participation that I explored. The first was frequent participation in various types of social, recreational and group activities over the past 12 months and in terms of ways that I defined frequent social participation I provided a reference that you could look at and basically for certain types of activity it was weekly participation but other activities it was monthly participation that we could consider to be frequent. I also examined those respondents who had wanted to participate in more social activities over the past 12 months and finally I spent some time exploring the barriers that the respondents identified that they felt had prevented more social participation so these were identified by the participants and then were coded by the CLSA personnel. As I mentioned I also looked at satisfaction with life and basically a level of agreement with several statements that was used to establish a score which I eventually dichotomized into either being satisfied with life or being less satisfied with life. Now this scale does have, it's been quite well tested for psychometric properties and it's found to have very long internal validity and good temporal stability so it was a pretty solid measure to use as well. And then finally in terms of how to assess pet ownership well the CLSA tracking questionnaire includes one question which asks do you have a household pet that provides you with companionship. And then moving into my analysis for establishing the baseline I created proportions that were stratified by pet ownership and used FTS to determine whether these were statistically significant. In terms of my second objective I used logistic regression models to compare pet owners and non-owners in terms of life satisfaction, the levels of social participation, barriers to social participation and finally associations between social participation and life satisfaction. And all of my models were controlled for socio-demographic variables and for probability reaching as well. Now I'm going to move on to sharing with you some of the findings. And so for instance what I found was that compared to non-owners, older pet owners were less likely to be in the older group of the cohort so older than 75 years. They were less likely to belong to a visible minority, they were less likely to live alone, to rent their homes and to have completed post-secondary education. Now I also wanted to highlight for you some of the findings that I think are interesting as we start to think about both vulnerability and diversity within our aging population. And so I think that these are important given that we can expect increasing proportions of older adults who are for instance new immigrants to Canada. And as we think through some of the increasing social acceptability of people who identify with leading alternative lifestyles I think it's also important to note that there's a pretty robust prevalence of pet ownership among lower income older adults. So as we think about promoting aging in place and trying to really promote social inclusion across the aging population, I think it's very interesting to keep in mind that there is this commonality of pet ownership that I think we need to take note of. In terms of life satisfaction within our sample we found that pet owners as a whole tend to indicate lower levels of life satisfaction. And this again is adjusted for socio demographics and for some people this might be a little bit of a surprising finding. As I mentioned in the earlier part of my presentation it's not unheard of within the literature and I do think that there are various explanations for this. And for instance the trend might reflect older adults who in fact seek the companionship of a pet when they find that their own human relationships are lacking or are unfulfilling. And so sometimes when you think of it that a person, an older person who is lonely seeks out a pet, some researchers have posed that this is actually reverse causation rather than the pet itself causing loneliness or in this case lower levels of life satisfaction. In terms of levels of social participation what I found was that as a whole pet owners were less likely to be frequent participators in one or more recreational or group activities than non-owners and you can see it's a substantially lower odds ratio. But at the same time pet owners and non-owners were equally likely to have wanted to be more socially active over the past year. So while on the one hand we found that pet owners were more likely to participate in no social activities they were no more likely to be dissatisfied with their current level of social participation. And so again in trying to think about what this means both from my interviews with the socioeconomic cross-section of pet owners but also supported within the current literature I think that there's a possibility that people do consciously decide to forgo what might otherwise be appealing recreational activities and opportunities to socialize because of their responsibilities for their pets. And yet it's also possible that they do still feel somewhat fulfilled and rewarded by the companionship that their pets are. Along with these lines we also had an interesting finding in terms of considering the levels of social participation. So one of the things we found was that the most socially active pet owners and those were the ones who were frequent participators in five or more social activities, they actually had highest levels of life satisfaction and this included being compared to similarly active non-pet owners. Now once again I think it's striking if we keep in mind that as a whole pet owners overall had lower life satisfaction so there's something about being more socially involved as well as having pets that seems to be particularly supportive. And this also seems to align with other studies that have reported that pet ownership is particularly advantageous for those older adults who also have established social connections. Now as I mentioned earlier we can't be certain that the increased likelihood of being satisfied is actually caused by the pet presence but I do think it's plausible that having a pet may contribute to some extent given that we have controlled for the various other socio-demographic factors. So now I want to move on and talk a little bit about the barriers to social participation. By way of quickly explaining this slide what I've done here is I've organized the barriers that the CLSA participants identified into a broader framework of categories that's identified within the global age-friendly city strategy. Now we explored barriers to social participation just for the subgroup of respondents who were not satisfied with their current levels of participation. So this was a subgroup of just over 2,000 respondents. And one of the things we found was that pet owners were more likely than non-pet owners to identify some of the different barriers that fell under the categories of accessible opportunities, of having an appropriate range of events and activities and also of encouraging social participation. So I think it's important to keep these in mind because these categories are all relevant to efforts that are being made to enhance opportunities for social participation across the aging population. But in particular I'd like to highlight three of these barriers because for me these are actually quite theoretically interesting. And what we found for these three barriers was that if we think about the conceptual links with social isolation and particularly for the barrier of not wanting to go alone in terms of preventing social participation, but also the barrier of having a health condition or a health limitation, we found that it was actually the non-pet owners who had indicated experiencing these barriers who had a lower life satisfaction level. And yet for pet owners, we didn't find any significant association. So the pet owners who identified these barriers didn't necessarily have a reduced life satisfaction compared to the pet owners who did not identify these barriers. And so this is where I suggest we might see some indication that the companionship of a pet may be offsetting some of the negative experiences of social isolation. And similarly you can see that I've included personal or family responsibilities in this sort of group of particularly interesting barriers. We didn't have information on what types of responsibilities our respondents had in mind when they identified this as a barrier. But once again we saw that those non-pet owners who identified this barrier actually had lower levels of life satisfaction than the pet owners who identified this barrier. So again I think it's reasonable and once more I'm drawing on my own interviews with older pet owners to see that while responsibilities for pets may be prohibitive for at least some of the pet owners who we spoke with or who responded to the CLSA survey, the impact of these responsibilities still may be offset to a certain extent by the contributions that pets may be making to their owners lives. So I'm going to just shift into a quick discussion of what some of the implications of these findings may be as we think through our efforts to promote age-friendly cities and aging in place. And so first of all, thinking about the baseline description, as I mentioned before, I think that we need to note that interests in pets may actually transcend socio-cultural and socio-economic differences. And they may also go as far as promoting opportunities for intergenerational interactions. So again I think that as we think through ways to enhance social participation across the aging population and to think about inclusion, this is just something that is important to take note of is this shared potential shared interest in pets. But I think it's also important to highlight ways that costs and the responsibilities of pet care may be prioritized over dedicating time or spending money on social activities, so on remaining socially engaged. And so if we think about time and access, for older adults who do have a sense of responsibility for their pets in a sense that they can't leave them for too long, they may not have the time to be able to for example take public transit to something that they would otherwise be interested in doing. And so location is really key as well as convenient access. And of course if we think about these things in relation to pet owners, well thinking about these in relation to non-pet owners and the broader population are important as well. Again, thinking about fixed incomes. So for pet owners, being on a fixed income may preclude affording some of the extras. So some of those activities that do have costs associated with them. And another aspect of affordability would involve the need for the occasional relief from pet care duties. So some people can afford to put their for instance their pet dogs into something like a doggy daycare for a couple of hours. I did have a research participant who did this on a weekly basis because she could not leave her dog in her apartment because it would bark. Now she had the means to be able to take this dog to a doggy daycare. But not all older pet owners are going to have this. So thinking through affordability is really going to be key, but also potentially thinking through ways that we can assist with relief from pet care. Now I think that different ways that we could consider this include building social networks and trying to think about ways that we really promote informal networks of support, whether within neighborhoods or within other types of interest groups. But I think there's also room for us to think about ways that volunteer and subsidized programs can both assist with some of the challenges of pet care that older adults may start to experience. But can even offer relief via opportunities for casual pet care. Just letting people get out of their homes for a little while and easing that worry about what might be happening with their pet. Finally, I guess the last implication that I'd like to talk a little bit about is offering more opportunities that in fact align with the interests that older adults may have in pets. And this might also involve rethinking ways that public spaces might become more pet friendly. So in terms of this, I think we could think about social activities that have themes that are interesting to pet owners. So whether it's themes around learning more about pets or ways to care for pets. But potentially I suggest that opportunities might also include pets at specified times and locations. And at the same time we could think through volunteer opportunities that are available for older adults that might appeal to people who have interests in pets. And so that could include volunteer opportunities where older adults can include their pets and help others in different ways. But it can also be volunteer opportunities for older adults who love companion animals but no longer have pets. Along similar lines I think that it's worth exploring the possibility of including pet related supervision during some of the activities that we offer to older adults so that people don't necessarily have to leave their pets in order to participate. And one particular, when we think about dog walking, I think there's a lot of unexplored potential in terms of organized dog walking groups. And in fact earlier this summer I had the privilege of speaking with some active aging program coordinators for one of our local seniors housing providers who are really quite interested in trying to pilot a dog walking program. Now in that situation it did not involve older adults who actually had dogs of their own. But it involved bringing in trained therapy dogs to be walks by these people. And again whether it's using dog walking for the interest of people who already have their own dogs as a way of pulling them out of their homes and building social networks or having opportunities to join up with people who have dogs. I do think that these can promote both physical activity but also really important and valuable opportunities for social participation. And I do want to highlight that by all means I'm not calling at all for a pet takeover and I need to acknowledge that it's not always appropriate to have pets in public venues and not everybody wishes to interact with other people's pets. And of course not all pets are able to be out in public in the public areas safely. But I do think that it's important to balance the needs of all older adults. And currently we tend to ignore or under emphasize pet owners' interests. So these are really missing from many of the organized efforts that are being made to promote age friendliness. In thinking through the results of my study there are some strengths and some limitations. And as I've mentioned throughout I do believe that the social ecological approach is a strength. There's been really little attention paid to ways that some of our systemic factors are shaping people's experiences with pets. And I think having a conceptual link with the age friendly cities framework is also really valuable as we think through ways to really promote aging in place in ways that are inclusive. But there are also some important limitations. For instance the CLSA data set doesn't offer species distinctions. And we know from the literature that dog owners and cat owners may have and experience different types of health outcomes. Dogs in particular often lead to higher levels of physical activity whereas cats don't necessarily do this. Once again, while I've looked at social participation we know that there are other indicators of social well-being. And in fact again thinking back to the last CLSA presentation by Nancy Newell and Verena Menek the cluster analysis that they presented that really considered not just social isolation loneliness but social participation. It drew together several measures of social well-being. Considering this would certainly give us a much fuller sense for sort of the social lives that pet owners versus non-owners are leading. Because I just have come in at the first wave of data collection my study is cross-sectional in design. So of course we can't make any decisive causation types of conclusions. But it does also set the stage for future longitudinal studies as the CLSA data collection continues. In particular I think it would be valuable to start to draw on the experiences of the 45 to 64 year olds in future analyses and to sort of explore their patterns of both pet ownership and social participation pre and post retirement. And to really think through the implications for aging in place. And of course in terms of the measures themselves I just want to highlight one of the findings that I found during my MSc research was around the activity of dog walking. So dog walking as I've talked about promotes physical activity but it also promotes a sense of community for older individuals. Now what's interesting as I look through the way that social participation questions were asked within the CLSA and other studies as well. Some of the steps Canada work. It's possible that activities like dog walking are actually not captured in our social participation measures because they're not always organized. So often a person will go out on their own with their dog and they will end up running into people but it's not necessarily captured by the ways that we're currently measuring social participation. And so our measures may actually be underestimating social participation for pet owners. I just wanted to send a moment to highlight that there is a growing recognition that we as researchers are missing something important when we fail to pay attention to the roles that pets play in people's lives. So it isn't just a critique of ways that some of our quantitative measures are conceptualized but even from the qualitative area of research I just wanted to highlight a quote that was put forward by researchers who are considering ways that people with pets are being interviewed. And they suggest that pets are often presented as important family members and yet researchers' responses to the presence or talk about pets was often markedly different from their reactions to other household members. So it's really just being more aware that there is something going on when we learn that a person is living with a companion animal and we need to be attentive to that, especially given that often over a third of our aging population does report having a pet. So I just wanted to quickly come back to the case that I highlighted at the start of my presentation. And again, this older adult who claimed that she would choose homelessness over giving up her kitten. And I wanted to share with you the outcome and it actually was a happy outcome. It turned out that there was vacancy available in our cities only to my knowledge cat-friendly subsidized seniors housing complex. And so this older woman and her kitten were able to move there and they've remained there together ever since. I also need to highlight that if she had a puppy she might not have been so lucky because again to the best of my knowledge in our city we have no subsidized seniors housing that will allow dogs of any size. And so really what the take-home point of this case is is that we know that a substantial number of older adults are going to choose to share their lives with the pet and they'll do what it takes to maintain these important relationships. So as we consider friendly cities I think that we can do a better job of addressing some of the structural elements that can enhance older adults' abilities to live better with their pets and ultimately to improve quality of life for both the people and for their companion animals. Now I've presented and talked about a lot of different things so I wanted to just quickly remind you of what I think the main conclusions of this particular study are. So the first is that many older adults have pets and these will include members of diverse and vulnerable subpopulations. Second, that having a pet is often associated with both lower life satisfaction and lower levels of social participation for older adults. And yet having a pet may also help to offset some of the negative outcomes of being socially isolated. That pet owners with higher levels of social participation may also have the highest level of life satisfaction. And finally that efforts to promote social participation that also consider pet owners needs and interests may contribute to the age friendly priority of enhancing social participation. And I just want to quickly acknowledge first of all that I've been very privileged to have a very interdisciplinary team of mentors both within my supervisory committee and beyond. My research has been privileged to have access to perspectives from social work, from public health, from sociology, veterinary medicine, geriatric medicine, epidemiology, and I think that this really reflects the complex reality of aging in place with pets. I would also like to thank the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging for granting access to this data set. And of course I'd like to acknowledge all of my case study research participants and the valuable information that I have received to support this area of research. And I also thank everybody for listening and thinking about what I've had to say. And I hope that people have some questions or some reflections on what I've shared with you today. And I also hope that the photo on this last slide sort of speaks to the idea that maybe we can have a whole bunch of cats together in a public space. We're used to seeing this for dogs but I thought this was an amazing way to reflect on just thinking through things a little bit differently. So thank you. Thank you very much Ann. It's a great presentation and I love that photo as well. So now I would like to open it up to questions. Just a reminder you can enter your questions into the chat window in the bottom right hand corner of WebEx. So while we wait for a few questions to come in, I just had one of my own. So you mentioned for your analysis of the CLSA data that you looked in particular at life satisfaction and social participation. But you mentioned that pet ownership is often associated with lower life satisfaction and you alluded that maybe due to fewer human relationships. I just wanted to ask you a thought about looking at loneliness at all as a measure or even perhaps depression. Yeah, well those are two measures that have received quite a bit of attention within the existing literature. And so again what's a little bit tricky with the evidence on pets and aging is that there tend to be both huge methodological inconsistencies and fairly mixed findings. So for instance with loneliness there's some really interesting work that does confirm that older women in particular with pets may be lonelier but that those who are lonely are less likely to actually become depressed if they're pet owners compared to non-owners. So I think what happens is the complexity of relationships with pets that they hinge on both individual characteristics of both the human and the companion animal side of the bond but also the socio economic circumstances, some of the systemic barriers, so things like living in insecure housing situation so having a pet but realizing that you can no longer afford to pay your rent and you're not sure where you're going to be able to move with this very important companion in your life. They're just such a complex array of factors that might play into things like loneliness and depression but we're not necessarily going to see the contributions that pets are making by simply looking at pets as an exposure that leads to an outcome. So I hope that answers your question to some degree Laura. It really is, there are many different factors that merit our attention. It does, it's obviously very kind of complicated to tease out the different factors. So we have a few questions that have come through. So one is the first one's from Alana. I was wondering whether you found a difference in life satisfaction among seniors who both owned a pet and lived with at least one other person versus those who owned a pet but otherwise lived alone? Right, you know I have not yet stratified in that way just if I'm just going to take a quick look through some of my data tables I think that I will agree with you that I think it's very interesting to look at the impact of life circumstances and interestingly enough when I recruited for older adults in Calgary to participate in my in-depth interviews I almost exclusively had respondents who lived alone with pets and I think that it's really important to consider that. But once again based on what I have analyzed to date it does tend to be complicated and so it's not quite as straightforward as saying that an older adult with a pet is more or less satisfied with life. There are just so many other factors that seem to play in and I think again as I think through some of the inspiring work in terms of the cluster analysis that considers both it combines measures of social isolation perhaps marital status so being single versus being married or being divorced. Things like that you do start to see just how complicated the impact situation as well as having a companion animal can be and I did just quickly want to point out that there is a study that's included in my reading list that was conducted by Hemsworth and Rock that looked at life satisfaction and stratified by marital status and one of the most interesting findings was that it was actually older adults who were divorced or separated and living by themselves where we did start to see a bit of a effect modification with pet ownership so they were more likely to have a higher level of satisfaction with life. So there's still a lot more work to do along those lines and I really appreciate you highlighting that because it's definitely one of the subpopulations that's obviously at risk of social isolation and for whom a pet might be a particularly pivotal life line. Okay, thank you. So the next question is from Denise. I assume this is referring to the case study or the newspaper article that you mentioned. Why are pets not accepted in housing spaces? Barking, should we look into this issue also? Well, yes. Thank you for highlighting that, Denise. I think that especially when we start looking at apartment style living noise is a huge issue as well as the reality that people who have cats will tend to keep their cats within their own personal living space. Whereas, while not all older adults with dogs actually walk their dogs, those who do will need to be using some of the shared public spaces as well. So there are just more opportunities for interactions with other people, for instance people whose pets might use the public spaces as their bathroom areas and if people aren't picking up after their pets. So noise and some of these other types of nuisance tend to come up. I do think having looked, I'm looking quite a bit at this housing issue within other dimensions of my case study. And there isn't a whole lot of evidence that supports the no pets rules and regulations that do tend to prevail. But there are also in situations where there are difficulties, they can be very, very hard on the housing managers to have to deal with and often take them above and beyond really what their duties to manage the housing should be. So in some of my other work, I am proposing some strategies to try and draw more coordination among, for instance, animal welfare agencies with housing providers, with other social support providers to try and address some of these types of issues. So thank you for asking about that. Okay, from Audrey Anne, do you know whether there is research to support the notion that level of engagement with the pet impacts life satisfaction? You know what, there is fairly recent research that I think has some really valuable findings that looks not so much at, let me see at level of social participation, but it asked older adults to keep track of how much time they were spending with their pets and what they were doing. And the interesting findings for that was that it wasn't older adults who were spending dedicated time to pet-related activities whose mental health was actually being supported by their pets, but it was those older adults who were just going through their daily routines with sort of with their pets by their sides. So whether it was reading a book with a pet or making a meal and having the cat or the dog kicking around in the kitchen with you, they did find that just the amount of time that older adults were spending with their pets in these sort of non-dedicated activities did seem to really support their mental well-being. So that's what I have seen so far and I do think that that is an area that's worth further investigation because again just trying to unpack some of the complex ways that these relationships are playing out for people in both positive and potentially negative ways. Okay, thank you. So from Natasha, is it correct to interpret from your presentation that current measures place more value on human interactions versus companion animal interactions? I do, you know, from my knowledge of the literature I would say yes, and to a certain extent for good reason there are certain ways that people can support one another that are highly necessary and highly important, but there's also a real resistance to accepting that for some people and in some circumstances relationships with companion animals can be absolutely the pivotal. There is the constant companionship and the acceptance and sort of the ease of not being judged or, you know, there are different ways that relationships with pets can be extremely meaningful for people and there's a lot of evidence that shows that increasingly people view pets as sort of family members and they do have familial types of relationships with pets, but overall there does still tend to be an undervaluing of what this relationship means in some people's lives. So yes, I think that's a really great point that you bring up. Okay, so we have just a comment and then a final question. So Ann, this is from Ye Ping. I just wanted to congratulate you for an interesting and excellent study, well done. This is really from a friend. Hello, great presentation. I wonder if you look at an experiment of non-owners, then you randomized select for pet owners versus non-pet and thus over time you will look for life satisfaction and social participation for the two groups. So have you thought about doing sort of what's the future of your research look like? Right, sorry, I'm just trying to think through the randomized. I'm not sure if this will answer your question, but it can be very difficult to look at that type of experimental design when it comes to pet, asking somebody to take on the commitment of having a pet, because whether it comes to housing circumstances or an inability or an inexperience in terms of really knowing what you're getting into when you commit to having a companion animal, this can have really troubling consequences both on a person's life but also on the animal welfare. So there has been a little bit of work that I've seen that has taken, you know, gone to great lengths to try and randomize adopting pets and trying to follow various outcomes of interest for these samples, but these types of experimental designs are really, really difficult with pet ownership. So we do tend to focus on sometimes natural experiments and being able to follow people who have naturally chosen to have a pet. But I think what your question really highlights is just the complexity, and that people will get pets for various reasons and that these pets will have various impacts on people's lives. So it's just a really difficult effect to try and tease out and isolate when it's happening in the context of daily lives and of the cities and the homes in which we live. So thank you again, though, for your ideas. Okay, we've just had one final question come in and I think that we'll have just enough time to squeeze and answer it for this one. So Amit says, I might have missed this. Is there an increase in falls for older adults of pets? For example, do they trip more of their pets, especially for frail older adults? Yeah, and I didn't actually present on that. I've looked very preliminary at the falls data in the CLSA data just out of interest. And I can tell you, first of all, there were very few people who did report more severe falls and I saw no difference between pet owners and non-owners. But it is important to flag that tripping over one's pet, especially as a person's mobility begins to diminish, is definitely a concern. And thinking through the inner spaces of people's homes is merit's attention as well. So thank you for bringing that up. Okay, thank you very much again, Anne, for an excellent presentation and obviously many aspects to consider when talking about pet ownership. So thank you again for everyone who attended today's webinar. Our next one is scheduled for Tuesday, January 17th at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. Dr. Martin Huseman will tell us more about his work as Scientific Director of the Launch Tunnel Aging Study Amsterdam. Registration will be open next week. So thank you again for attending today's presentation. You can learn more about the CLSA in accessing data by visiting www.clsa-elcb.ca. Thanks again.