Leave It To Man’s Best Friend To Save A Generation.
Want to keep the doctor away? Eat an apple. Want to reduce stress, extend and improve the quality of your life, eliminate the blues, and keep the doctor away? Get a dog.
Friendly licks and cheerful yaps are proven to keep seniors active with sharp minds and add to their overall happiness. In fact, an experimental residential home for the elderly which is filled with over 100 birds, dogs, and cats and has an outside environment with rabbits and chickens, has experienced a 15 percent lower mortality rate than traditional nursing homes over the past five years.
A Wagging Difference:
Walking, in general, offers excellent health benefits, such as controlling blood pressure, managing weight, decreasing risk of heart attack and stroke, and preventing depression. However walking with Rover provides potentially greater health benefits than walking without him: this provides a undeniable argument that pet companionship shields human stress and encourages an increase in parasympathetic neural activity (to control smooth muscle contraction and regulate cardiac muscle) and is the instrument that helps keep health problems away.
Although walking is probably the most effortless exercise to do, it may not always be easy to fit it into our schedules. However, having Fido tug at your shirt and bring you his leash, when he wants to go for a W-A-L-K, encourages exercise especially for seniors who may sometimes lose that motivation. Starting at a good pace, with a good companion increases endorphins and keeps seniors with positive energy. Studies show that humans interact with dogs by using all five senses, especially sight and touch. Ninety-five percent of seniors dog owners talk to their pooch and it has been stated that frequently talking to a dog stabilizes a patient’s heart rate.
Pets don’t judge, so why should we?
As the population of Baby Boomers begins to age, the R word is something to start thinking about: Retirement. However, in almost all of Toronto’s retirement homes pets are simply visitors, not guests. This forces seniors to part ways from a true member of the family as thousands of Rovers and Lassies are left abandoned and required to find a foreign home or shelter.
Not only does this cause grief upon seniors, but they will not be getting the proper benefits they could be getting if Fido was panting around. Etobicoke’s Hearthstone By The Bay is one of the few lifestyle retirement homes in the GTA to allow pets as guests in their facility. Seniors can enjoy the company of their four legged friend at all times, as if they never left home at all. Hearthstone By the Bay also offers services like dog walking and pet grooming for all sized pooches.
With roughly 25 per cent of the world’s population aging over 60 in the next 25 years, it may not be the vaccines and vitamins that will have our grandparents living forever young – leave it up to man’s (and woman’s) best friend to save not only the day, but an entire generation. Good doggies!
Hearthstone By The Bay is located at 3 Marine Parade Drive
(Lake Shore Blvd. + East of Parklawn Road) in Etobicoke,
416.259.4466, www.HearthstoneByTheBay.com
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