Alan Beck and Aaron Katcher have documented the thereputic benefits of animal companionship: Patients who are unwilling to approach or talk to a therapist are able to reach out to an animal. After playing with, touching, and talking to the animal, they begin to talk to humans again. Beck and Katcher reported a number of other findings:

1. Almost everybody with a pet talks to it as if it were a person, and the way people talk to cats, dogs, and birds resembles the way we talk to infants.
2. While talking to people usually raises blood pressure, sometimes to very high levels, the touch-talk dialogue we establish with pets reduces stress and lowers blood pressure.
3. Just having a pet in a room makes people feel safer and lowers blood pressure.
4. People with pets make fewer doctor visits.
5. Pets can coax smiles and words out of socially withdrawn institutionalized patients of all ages.
6. Pets can make psychotherapy progress faster.

According to Beck and Katcher, 99 percent of the clients at the University of Pennsylvania veterinary clinic said that they talked to their pets. Over 30 percent said they confided in their pets.

Most of the children who talked to their pets believed that the pets understood the meaning of the words they were using. More than 70 percent of adolescents owning horses confided in the horse.

Obviously, many people feel comfortable and receive benefit from communicating with animals. Even more important, perhaps, is the emotional effect pets have on humans: When people face real adversity—disease, unemployment, or the disabilities of age—affection from a pet takes on new meaning. Then the pet's continuing affection is a sign that the essence of the person has not been damaged.