Stress relief? Pets are great stress relief. So maybe you live longer when you have a pet.
PS am in market for cat(s), Southern Germany.
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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It's probably mostly a side effect of our ability to feel love for each other.
As a group animal we have an instinct to protect each other that is born from love, that instinct help us survive as a group. The pet is included and can become part of the group maybe even family.
This trait has also helped us build relations with some animals that have historically been beneficial to our survival, like dogs horses and farm animals. For less immediately "useful" pets, the instinct is the same, and although it doesn't serve the same purpose, it may be helpful psychologically to overcome hardship, and maybe tie the group together more closely.
I think animal affection -- particularly for cute, non useful animals -- is an extension of our infant protection drive.
Yes, but that goes only for infant animals, infant animals generally look cute to most predators, to give them a chance to survive if they are detected by a predator.
But I think the question is meant to go further than that, because animals can become part of our group as adults too. And will help rescue and protect in a situation of disaster, and will also be rescued and protected. For those animals the love goes deeper than just looks.
Sometimes things don't necessarily evolve to have a specific benefit. They just happen, and don't get selected out because they're not a detriment to the species.
Though danger kitties being so cute and (theoretically) cuddlable seems like a bit of a detriment... I just want to hold the big tigers and lions and jaguars and ow please stop I just want to snuggle youuu
My hypothesis has always been that we find baby (and adult!) animals cute to incentivize us to care for them when they need care, because our ancestors benefited tremendously from their presence in our lives. I agree that it probably started as accidental overlap from parental instincts but I think the feeling is too strong and applies to too many distinct animals to be coincidental.
That said, this is just my pet theory and I have no evidence for it.
Given that domesticated animals adopted some human baby like actions, it is a plausible theory.
we have been breeding them for traits we like.
True, but you can have similar emotions towards wild animals.
sure. most of that goes back to the baby thing. most animals have some of the features babys have and the animal babys tend to be this way and evoke more feeling as well.
One I can think of would be stress relief. Stress contributes to a lot of negative health outcomes, and cuddling with a pet can help mitigate some of that stress. Wouldn't surprise me if amount of stress also has a more general effect on overall decisionmaking.
That’s a personal benefit, but it’s not necessarily an evolutionary benefit. If it were an evolutionary benefit, the selection pressure would have been for our bodies to generate that response spontaneously without needing an external stimulus that wouldn’t have been available to many of our ancestors.
Negative health outcomes are an evolutionary pressure.
Also, evolution does not work from a plan, we do not spontaneously generate all the things that would benefit us over a long enough timeframe. Instead, random things happen and certain ones propagate while others don't. Because it is not a conscious force operating from any sort of plan, and instead works via random mutation and propagation of beneficial traits, it leaves a whole bunch of potentially beneficial things unadopted.
Otherwise all life would just move towards some sort of optimal form, maybe crabs, instead of evolving greater and greater diversity that can better handle changing environments.
Beneficial mutations are random, but the odds of them persisting are proportional to the frequency of the events in which they affect our fitness. And the proportion of stressful events in which pets were available would have been only a fraction of the total number of stressful events our ancestors experienced.
If pets are available in 10% of stressful events, the selection pressure for stress reduction that doesn’t require pets would be ten times greater.
But what is the likelihood of this autonomous stress relieving function arising, how many mutations would be required to implement such a thing? Would it have any significant drawbacks or side effects in other aspects of our biology?
You can't look only at the propagation side of things.
Another thing, stress isn't event based per se. It's more of a floating value that always exists to a certain degree and provides both positive and negative effects at different levels and in different situations. The negative health impacts come in when it remains high for a long period of time. So what we'd really want to look at is something like the frequency of headpats given to your dog or something, and the effects of this compared to other potential stress relieving activities like meditation.
Lastly, I would check your data on pet availability, I think it'd be far, far higher than 10%.
Even if every human on earth had their own pet since dogs were first domesticated ten or twenty thousand years ago, their ancestors were facing the stress of migrating into new and unfamiliar environments for several hundred thousand years prior to that.
Certainly. But we still cannot say that should mean every beneficial mutation for their lives was likely to be adopted. Like I said earlier, the majority of possibly good things are left on the table, even when drawbacks are not considered.
Including drawbacks muddies it up even further, we can look at how cardiovascular shock occurs and how the particular traits that create it were a bit of a double edged sword.
Seems like a side effect from making us love baby humans
Pet = baby human