Why Cats Are Better than Dogs

Question

The heath benefits as to why owning a cat is better than owning a dog include; lowering your blood pressure and nervous system as well as preventing strokes and heart disease. It is a proactive and healthy choice to get a pet cat over a pet dog.

Answer 1

It's not a fact to say having a cat is better than owning a dog. both animals do have their benefits to them. Many of them share the added benefit of lowering blood pressure and increasing the overall improvement of your life. But now you have to know that if you have a dog you will be more active. You will have to take it out on a walk and run depending on what breed you have. The overall long-term health benefits of owning a dog when compared to a cat I would say is better.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/promotions/harvard-health-publications/get-healthy-get-a-dog-the-health-benefits-of-canine-companionship

Comments

I really liked how you sort of steered away from “fact” checking this and guided this claim to be more opinionated, which is what it is. There is a fine line between opinion and fact, and there is a distinction between facts associated with this claim (e.g. scientific reasoning on why dogs are physiologically more likely to be beneficial to owners) and defining what it means to be a “better” pet. From what I read, it seems that you think overall long-term health benefits of owning a dog are better when compared to owning a cat simply because dogs are more active. The person who wrote this claim, however, may not define “better” in such ways. However, you did include a credible source, being from Harvard Medical School, but that article never stated that dogs were “better than cats”, but rather stated many reasons why dogs are just beneficial pets to have in general. The article never compared cats to dogs, which is why I think this fact check is not very reasonable.

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I agree that neither animal is better, it is much more of a personal preference whether you believe one is better than the other. While you stated that a dog may have the greatest influence on your life because they are active, so therefore you also have to be, I believe that it is more based on lifestyle. A dog can be a lot more work, requiring much more attention and time. If you have a busy lifestyle, this can be hard to manage. A cat is much less mantinance and is a great, calm fuzzy friend. Either one can be equally beneficial to your life, depending on how busy or how much time you have.

Answer 2

There is no way to generalize that cats are better than dogs as that can only be based on preferences and one’s own opinion. Given what was said in the initial post, it is possible one pet could be better for your health when it comes to certain criteria, but that exaggerates and misleads the general claim that cats are better than dogs. The National Library of Medicine link even provides some health stats based off of cats and dogs yet still comes to the conclusion that there are no current associations between one animal or the other when it came to the explored health conditions. All other sites that were visited spoke towards preferences and what might be thought of as what more people would see as good and bad qualities in pets which doesn’t factually back up the initial claim with hard evidence. Each pet is likely owned for different reasons which also can make it unreasonable to outright say one is better than the other. 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4991891/#:~:text=Of%20these%2C%202435%20(55%20%25),cholesterol%2C%20and%20body%20mass%20index

https://voicesofwinchester.org/2738/opinion/why-cats-are-better-than-dogs/

https://www.thesprucepets.com/why-cats-are-better-than-dogs-554880