The Surprising Ways Dogs Protect Us

Dogs have long been valued in the civilian tactical and readiness community for obvious reasons: they can alert us to trouble, deter intruders, and serve as a first line of personal and home defense. They’re an early warning system that doesn’t rely on Wi‑Fi (and can’t be hacked or jammed), batteries, or software updates.

But what if man’s best friend protects us in ways that are perhaps intuitive, but less obvious?

Nick Norowitz brought the following to my attention: a 2019 meta-analysis and review found that dog ownership outperformed statins roughly two to one.

Outcome	Dog Ownership	Statins (Primary Prevention)
All-cause mortality reduction	24%	9–17%
Cardiovascular mortality reduction	31%	15%
Prior coronary events (all-cause)	65%	~28%

Dog ownership was associated with a 24% reduction in all-cause mortality in the general population. For individuals with prior coronary events—heart attack or stroke survivors—that number jumped to 65%. Cardiovascular mortality was reduced by 31%.

Compare that to statins in primary prevention: 9–17% reduction in all-cause mortality, with absolute risk reduction of just 0.8% over 5 years. That means you need to take a daily pill for 5 years to achieve a 1.6% chance of avoiding a heart attack and a 0.37% chance of avoiding a stroke.

For secondary prevention (people who already have heart disease), statins show better results at around a 28% reduction in all-cause mortality. Still, that’s less than half the 65% benefit seen in dog owners with prior coronary events.

This is the kind of thing that’s like a smorgasbord of confirmation bias.

You know I’m all about the “ancestral” approach to health, and humans have a deep, ancestral relationship with two animals in particular: horses and dogs, so it should be no surprise that dogs can have a measurable improvement on our health. We have over 1000 generations of coexistence.  We both do better together.

The oldest known evidence of a human-canine bond consists of 26,000-year-old footprints found in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France, revealing a 9- to 10-year-old barefoot boy walking alongside a wolf or large dog.  

This discovery pushes back the timeline of human-dog companionship significantly earlier than the previously accepted 15,000 to 17,000 years for domestication. Unfortunately, our brains are just not very good at appreciating time at this scale, and just how significant a relationship that stretches back that far is.

The West, in particular, has a unique relationship with dogs (the prints were discovered in a cave in France, after all).  Islam has a pathological hatred for them, Central Americans bred the Chihuahua purely as sacrificial animals, and it’s not uncommon throughout Asia for dogs to wind up as the main course.

Once again, I digress…

Regardless, if I’m going to apply my logic consistently, I have argued many times in the past that statins are only “effective” when you look at “relative risk,” and do basically nothing in absolute terms, so twice nothing is still basically nothing.

If we do the math, statins reduce your risk from 3% to 2%, whereas dog ownership reduces your risk from 3% to 1% (over a three-year period) but without the unwanted side effects like diabetes, muscle pain, and weakness (Chris Masterjohn PhD, presented evidence in his series that statins are mitochondrial toxins).

Now, to be fair, dog ownership is not pain-free either.  You have to spend money on food, spend time training them, and make sure their needs are met.  It’s like having a toddler for 10+ years.

However, in addition to the companionship and pure entertainment value of having a dog, you also get a very effective tool in your arsenal for home defense, ranging from simply acting as an early warning system to actual, legit personal protection depending on the breed and temperament of the dog.

That’s one hell of a return on investment.

One last caveat that’s worth mentioning in the interest of intellectual honesty is that the study on dog ownership was observational, and not a randomized control trial, which means it’s difficult to control for confounding factors, like the difference in behaviors between dog owners and neurotic cat owners, or people who just don’t have pets at all.

Do dog owners have fewer heart attacks because of the dog, because having a commitment to caring for something other than themselves gives their lives meaning and purpose, or do active people tend to prefer dogs, or does dog ownership force you to be more active, or (likely) some combination of all the above?

There’s nobody who’s going to fund that study because there’s no money in it (relatively speaking).

Anybody can breed dogs in the backyard.  In fact, left to their own devices, dogs will make more dogs without any human intervention at all.  That’s a tough market to corner by abusing IP law.

Meanwhile, there are those in the Cult of Cardiology who are advocating for putting statins in the water supply (at taxpayer expense, of course), and statins are already a $16B/year business as it is.

Fuck the statins and get a dog.  In my opinion, you’ll be better off all the way around.
*Disclaimer – not medical advice. Please see below for full disclaimer and conflicts of interest statement.

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