Your pet: A help or a hazard?

(RNN) - They can provide unconditional love and unbiased companionship, but they are also a gateway for pests and disease.

Long-standing wisdom has maintained owning a pet is beneficial to the owner in numerous ways, from emotional therapy to physical benefits such as lower blood pressure, but those findings are being called in questioned by Western Carolina University psychology professor Harold Herzog in a recent article by Science Daily.

"I'm not trying to denigrate the role of animals in human life, I'm trying to do just the opposite," said Herzog, a pet owner. "It's entirely plausible that our pets really do provide medical and psychological benefits, but we just don't know how strong that effect is, what types of people it works for, and what the underlying biological and psychological mechanisms might be."

He wrote an article in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science saying there is "insufficient evidence" to support claims of increased qualify of life because of the presence of domesticated animals. MORE>>