You And Your Pet May Be More Alike Than You Think

Do you and your pet look alike? Share the same sense of humor? Starting to wear the same clothes?

A new British study is finding that the longer an animal has been with its owner the more likely the animal is to pick up the owner’s characteristics.

2,500 pet lovers have been involved in a study that is being led by author and professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.

Even though the study is still ongoing, Wiseman said he has made some conclusions.

He said, “When you look at the data, you see that dog owners are spontaneous and fun loving, cat owners tend to be emotionally sensitive and independent and reptile owners don’t care too much for other people. They are very much independently minded.”

“What we’ve seen across the board, whether it’s cat owners or dog owners, is amazing personalities between those two,” Wiseman said. “So if you have someone [who] has a good sense of humor, they are claiming their animal also has that sense of humor. Someone who is outgoing has an extroverted cat or dog. So a lot of similarity between owners and their pets.”

Wiseman said he found some surprising data in regards to fish owners. About 60% of fish owners said that their fish have a very good sense of humor.

“The fish owners are the happiest, they are the most content in our sample and they are the ones claiming their pets make them laugh the most,” Wiseman said. “It could be that fish don’t have a sense of humor, or maybe we are onto a groundbreaking discovery here.”

Also, Wiseman discovered that people who have been with their pet for ten years or more had a very similar personality with their pet.

Many pet owners agree that they share personality traits or habits with their pet. One cat owner said, “The cat’s very lazy; it comes in, eats, sits around all day. Sits at the door to go out, you let it out, it comes back in again.”

The cat owner’s daughters said that’s how he also acts. Like father, like cat.