Find out why pets are essential in our senior living communities and why Atlas Senior Living is the best Pet Friendly choice.
Different studies and research have shown that having a pet at home benefits all family members, especially the elderly. In addition, several researchers have shown that living with an animal helps increase the quality of life and longevity.
Why?
Aging involves experiencing different deficiencies, situations, and new needs such as loneliness, diseases, and elderly pathologies; sedentary lifestyle, or dysthymia, among others. A pet can be our best team to address these deficiencies and live our golden years, happier and healthier. Therefore, the pet-friendly concept in our communities has taken an approach associated with the importance of the elderly person-pet bond as an essential element for promoting healthy aging.
Here are some of the proven benefits derived from this bond:
- Touching, petting, or hugging a pet brings calm and reduces heart rate, stress, anxiety, tension, depression, nerves, anger, sadness, and loneliness.
- Improves blood pressure, lowers cholesterol, and reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease.
- Help reduce the use of medications.
- Decrease perception of pain.
- Reduce insomnia.
- Increase appetite.
- Increase motivation and sense of responsibility and decision-making.
- It contributes to the mental stimulation of the elderly since it will attract all their attention through movements, games, and affection. It will stimulate many of their senses (sight, smell, hearing, and touch).
- Helps bring out the most playful side of older adults. A pet will make them laugh and have fun.
- If the older adult has already had a pet in the past, a new one will help them remember old times positively and with great affection.
However, it is essential to note that not every animal is suitable for an older adult, nor is every older adult the right companion for any animal. Eider Fernández Cerrato, the ethologist responsible for Zintzoa Canine Education, points out: “When we talk about older people, the choice of the animal is even more important so that the accompaniment can be sustainable on both sides, that of the human and that of the dog. When that binomial is made up of two complementary parties, the relationship that is generated has strong ties, which sustain the emotional balance of both.”
That is why all our communities in the Assisted Living and Independent Living services are pet-friendly because the parties are complementary, and the balance of both is maintained. However, for residents in our Memory Care programs, we have animal-assisted therapies so that they can receive many benefits generated through the bond between elderly person-pet.
