It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Getting a puppy poses mental health challenges alongside benefits for U.K. families
Study suggests families considering a puppy should not assume it will boost everyone’s mental health
A survey study of families with puppies in the U.K. has identified multiple mental health challenges alongside benefits of ownership for adults and kids alike, suggesting that a mental health boost should not be the main motivator behind getting a puppy. Rowena Packer of the Royal Veterinary College, U.K., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on September 17, 2025.
Families may consider adding a puppy to the household with the hope that it will improve mental health, especially for kids. Such hopes were behind many puppy acquisitions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, prior research has returned ambiguous results about the potential benefits of pet ownership, and most studies have focused on adult owners, neglecting children’s experiences. To help address this gap, Packer and colleagues surveyed adults and children in U.K. households with a puppy, collecting data from a total of 382 adults and 216 children aged 8 to 17.
Analysis of the survey responses suggested that dog ownership brought joy to many parents and children alike. Many parents felt their dog provided mental health benefits to their children, and children reported feeling comfort and happiness from their dogs.
However, more than one-third of adults who served as the primary puppy caregiver in their household felt that having a puppy was more challenging than expected. Compared to experienced puppy owners, first-time owners were more likely to find child-puppy interactions to be challenging. Negotiating which family members were responsible for which aspects of dog care also posed challenges.
Some children reported frustration with their dogs’ attention-seeking behavior. Additionally, almost all children in the study were permitted to interact with their dog in ways that could increase the risk of being bitten.
Ninety-five percent of the primary puppy caregivers in the study were female, with many moms feeling overwhelmed with the responsibility of caring for their puppy, suggesting that moms may bear a greater share of the mental load associated with puppy ownership.
On the basis of the findings, the researchers highlight several considerations for families thinking of getting a puppy, such as discussing dog-care responsibilities with children and attending dog-training classes that include safety training for children.
Dr. Rowena Packer adds: “Our study shows that young children often interact with dogs in ways that can increase the risk of bites, such as hugging or cuddling them. Children are especially likely to approach their dogs for comfort when they feel upset, bored or lonely, which can lead to very close contact that some dogs find stressful. In these moments, dogs may react defensively, sometimes by snapping or biting to try and escape the situation. We encourage parents and caregivers to learn about safe dog–child interactions, set clear boundaries with their children, and closely monitor their interactions with dogs to protect both children and pets.”
Dr. Zoe Belshaw adds: “Bringing a new puppy into the family is often seen as a source of joy, companionship, and fun, but behind the excitement lies a great deal of unseen work. Our new research suggests that responsibility doesn’t always fall where people might expect. In families with school-aged children, we found that whilst children and fathers may help with certain puppy care tasks, the majority of the ongoing responsibility tends to be taken on by mothers. Mothers involved in our research described feeling overwhelmed trying to juggle the competing needs of their dog and their family, particularly during the puppyhood stages. This workload represents a significant and previously overlooked form of hidden women's labor.”
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: http://plos.io/4g5CZaq
Citation: Belshaw Z, Brand CL, O’Neill DG, Packer RMA (2025) More than just one man and his dog: The many impacts of puppy acquisition on the mental health of families including children in the UK. PLoS One 20(9): e0331179. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0331179
Author countries: U.K.
Funding: Society of Companion Animal Studies (no grant number provided).
More than just one man and his dog: The many impacts of puppy acquisition on the mental health of families including children in the UK
Article Publication Date
17-Sep-2025
Pathogens driving infections in both healthcare and community settings, including the growing threat of sexually transmitted infections, have been identified as posing significant antimicrobial resistance risks, according to a new Canadian evidence-based framework
Pathogens driving infections in both healthcare and community settings, including the growing threat of sexually transmitted infections, have been identified as posing significant antimicrobial resistance risks, according to a new Canadian evidence-based frameworkFacebook
Canada’s 2025 AMR priority pathogens: Evidence-based ranking and public health implications
Article Publication Date
17-Sep-2025
1 in 8 Italian cetacean strandings show evidence of fishery interactions, with bottlenose and striped dolphins most commonly affected, according to analysis across four decades of data and more than 5,000 strandings
Evidence of fishery interaction in cetaceans stranded along the Italian coastline: A. By-catch in animal history; B. Presence of fishing gears; C. Larynx entanglement; D. Ingestion; E. Net marks; F. Amputation; G. Penetrating wounds: G1. External view of the penetrating wound; G2. Focus on the penetrating wound; G3. Internal focus of the penetrating wound.
A chimpanzee eating figs at Ngogo in Uganda's Kibale National Park in 2018. UC Berkeley biologists measured the ethanol content of many types of fruit that chimps routinely consume and found that they contain substantial quantities — enough to suggest that the apes are chronically exposed to dietary alcohol.
The first-ever measurements of the ethanol content of fruits available to chimpanzees in their native African habitat show that the animals could easily consume the equivalent of more than two standard alcoholic drinks each day, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
It's not clear whether they actively seek out fruit with high ethanol levels, which are typically riper fruit with more sugars to ferment. But the availability of ethanol in many species of fruit that they normally eat suggests that alcohol is a regular part of their diet and likely was a part of the diets of our human ancestors.
"Across all sites, male and female chimpanzees are consuming about 14 grams of pure ethanol per day in their diet, which is the equivalent to one standard American drink," said UC Berkeley graduate student Aleksey Maro of the Department of Integrative Biology. "When you adjust for body mass, because chimps weigh about 40 kilos versus a typical human at 70 kilos, it goes up to nearly two drinks."
A "standard drink" in the U.S. contains 14 grams of ethanol, irrespective of the consumer's body size, although in much of Europe the standard is 10 grams.
The 21 species of fruit Maro sampled at two chimp study sites — Ngogo in Uganda and Taï in Ivory Coast — had an average alcohol content of 0.26% by weight. Primatologists who have studied chimps at these sites estimate that the animals consume about 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) of fruit per day, on average, and that fruit makes up about three-quarters of their diet. The researchers also have recorded for each site the approximate proportion of each fruit species in the chimp diet. This information allowed the Berkeley biologists to calculate an average rate of dietary ethanol consumption.
"The chimps are eating 5 to 10% of their body weight a day in ripe fruit, so even low concentrations yield a high daily total — a substantial dosage of alcohol," said Robert Dudley, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. "If the chimps are randomly sampling ripe fruit as did Aleksey, then that's going to be their average consumption rate, independent of any preference for ethanol. But if they are preferring riper and/or more sugar-rich fruits, then this is a conservative lower limit for the likely rate of ethanol ingestion."
Fruit consumption occurs throughout the day and the chimps show no overt signs of intoxication, Maro said. In fact, to get a buzz on, a chimp would have to eat so much fruit its stomach would bloat. But chronic low-level exposure suggests that the common ancestors of humans and chimps — our closest living relative among the apes — were also exposed daily to alcohol from fermenting fruit, a nutrient that is missing from the diets of captive chimps and many humans today.
"Chimpanzees consume a similar amount of alcohol to what we might if we ate fermented food daily," Maro said. "Human attraction to alcohol probably arose from this dietary heritage of our common ancestor with chimpanzees."
Maro is first author and Dudley is senior author of a paper about the study that will appear Sept. 17 in the journal Science Advances.
The 'drunken monkey' hypothesis
Dudley first began to suspect more than 20 years ago that the human appetite for alcohol was inherited from our primate ancestors, and wrote a 2014 book about his theory: The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol. This "drunken monkey" hypothesis drew skepticism from many scientists — particularly those who study primates — who told him that chimps and other primates don't eat fermented fruit or nectar. These nutrients typically contain alcohol produced by yeast metabolizing sugar, just as yeast ferments sugary grape juice into wine.
But over the years, Dudley's theory has gained an increasing number of adherents. More primatologists now report seeing monkeys and apes eating fermented fruit, a practice that was recorded earlier this year among chimps in Guinea-Bissau. Researchers also have published papers about captive primates' preferences for alcohol. Dartmouth University researchers in 2016 reported that when captive aye-ayes and slow lorises were offered nectar with varying percentages of alcohol, they finished off nectar with the highest alcohol content first — and then repeatedly revisited the empty high-alcohol containers as if they wanted more. In 2022, Dudley collaborated with researchers in Panama to document that spider monkeys consume alcohol-laden fermented fruit in the wild and express alcohol metabolites in their urine.
It's not only mammals that get a daily dose of alcohol from their diet. In a paper published earlier this year, Dudley and his Berkeley colleagues reported that the feathers from 10 of 17 bird species tested contained secondary metabolites of alcohol, indicating that their diet — nectar, grain, insects and even other vertebrates — included substantial amounts of ethanol.
"The consumption of ethanol is not limited to primates," Dudley said. "It's more characteristic of all fruit-eating animals and, in some cases, nectar-feeding animals."
He said that one theory about why animals seek out ethanol is that its odor helps animals find food with a higher sugar content, providing greater energy returns over time. Alcohol also may increase the pleasure of eating, similar to sipping wine with dinner. It's also possible that sharing alcohol-infused fruit plays a role in social bonding among primates or other animals.
"It just points to the need for additional federal funding for research into alcohol attraction and abuse by modern humans. It likely has a deep evolutionary background," Dudley said.
Collecting urine samples — with an umbrella
Beginning in 2019, Maro made two trips to Ngogo in Uganda's Kibale National Park and one to Taï National Park in Côte d‘Ivoire. At Ngogo, which hosts the largest chimpanzee social group in Africa, the chimps climb trees to pluck fruits and prefer several varieties of figs. Maro and colleagues at Ngogo collected undamaged, freshly fallen fruits from the ground under trees that had recently been foraged by chimps. At Taï, where chimps typically eat fallen fruit, the team collected undamaged and unnibbled fruit from the ground under trees.
Each sample was packed in an airtight container, the species, size, color and softness were recorded, and, once back at base camp, frozen to prevent further ripening. To test for alcohol content, Maro used different methods on each of the three field trips: a semiconductor-based device similar to a breathalyzer, a portable gas chromatograph and a chemical test. All recorded similar alcohol percentages. He tested each method in advance in Dudley's Berkeley lab using a standard procedure that could easily be replicated in the field, where he typically processed 20 samples in a 12-hour day.
Two of the procedures required thawing the fruit, removing the rind and seeds, blending the pulp, and letting it sit in an airtight container for a couple of hours to release alcohol. Air in the box, or "headspace," was then extracted for analysis of alcohol content. A third procedure involved extracting the liquid part of the pulp and using color-changing chemicals that react with ethanol.
Weighted by the proportion of time chimps eat each type of fruit, the average alcohol content of fruit was 0.32% by weight at Ngogo and 0.31% at Taï. The most frequently consumed fruits at each site — a fig, Ficus musuco, at Ngogo, and the plum-like fruit of the evergreen Parinari excelsa at Taï — were the highest in alcohol content. Troops of male chimpanzees often gather in the canopy of F. musuco trees to consume fruit before going on boundary patrols of their community, Maro noted. And the fruit of P. excelsa is also very popular among elephants, which are known to be attracted to alcohol.
"I think the strength of Aleksey's approach is that it used multiple methods," Dudley said. "One of the reasons this has been a tempting target but no one's gone after it is because it's so hard to do in a field site where there are wild primates eating known fruits. This dataset has not existed before, and it has been a contentious issue."
The new study provides the foundation for further studies in chimpanzee reserves to determine how much of the fermented, alcohol-laden fruit is preferentially consumed by chimpanzees. This summer, Maro returned to Ngogo to collect urine samples from chimps sleeping in trees — a fraught endeavor requiring an umbrella — in order to analyze them for alcohol metabolites, using test kits similar to those deployed in some U.S. workplaces. He and team member Laura Clifton Byrne, an undergraduate student at San Francisco State University, also followed chimpanzees to pick fruit freshly dislodged in the canopy and analyzed their alcohol content.
Co-authors of the paper are Aaron Sandel of the University of Texas, Austin; Bi Z. A. Blaiore and Roman Wittig of the Taï Chimpanzee Project; and John Mitani of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, one of the founders of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project. The work was funded by UC Berkeley.
Two male chimpanzees eating the plum-like fruit of the evergreen Parinari excelsa tree at Taï National Park in the Ivory Coast in 2021.
Time-lapse video from a camera trap set up in Taï National Park in the Ivory Coast in 2021. A chimpanzee dubbed Porthos stuffs his mouth with the plum-like fruit of the evergreen tree Parinari excelsa. Among chimps at Taï, this is the most popular food and has the highest alcohol content of all the fruit species sampled.
Permafrost, ground frozen for at least two years underlying the cold Arctic and alpine regions of the Northern Hemisphere, covers about 17% of the global land surface and stores an estimated one-third of the world's soil organic carbon. As climate change causes this permafrost to thaw, the potential release of greenhouse gases (GHGs) has raised concerns about passing a tipping point, triggering an irreversible positive feedback loop that accelerates warming. A critical unanswered question has been whether these ecosystems can maintain their role as a GHG sink in a warmer world.
A new study published in Science Advances on September 17, led by researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, provides a critical answer. The research shows that a warming of around 2°C enhances the GHG sink in Arctic permafrost ecosystems. However, this gain is substantially offset by a weakening of the GHG sink in alpine permafrost regions.
Assessing the net GHG response in permafrost is notoriously complex due to the strong spatial heterogeneity of these landscapes. "We integrated data from 1,090 independent sites with measured carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) responses to experimental warming across the Northern Hemisphere permafrost regions," said Bao Tao, the study's first author who led the data synthesis.
The study identified key regional differences driving this balance:
Alpine Permafrost: Found at higher altitudes and lower latitudes, these ecosystems have naturally low soil water content. Warming causes further soil drying, which substantially weakens carbon uptake through photosynthesis and accelerates carbon emissions.
Arctic Permafrost: These ecosystems, with their wetter soils and denser vegetation, sustain higher CO2 uptake. Warming increases subsurface soil water, further stimulating CO2 uptake and partially offsetting emissions from soil carbon decomposition. The primary concern here is a significant increase in CH4 emissions from waterlogged soils.
The research also shed light on the often-overlooked role of nitrous oxide (N2O). Warming triggered increased N2O emissions in both alpine and Arctic regions. While the absolute amount is low, thawing permafrost releases more available nitrogen into the soil, potentially leading to remarkable increases in N2O emissions. Given that N2O has a global warming potential approximately 273 times that of CO2 over a century, even small increases can have a disproportionately large impact on the climate.
"Keeping additional warming below 2°C in permafrost regions can help avoid a widespread positive permafrost–climate feedback in general," said Xu Xiyan, corresponding author of the study. "However, measures to mitigate warming in alpine permafrost ecosystems are urgent to preserve their fragile carbon sink."
The IPCC has highlighted permafrost-climate feedbacks as a major uncertainty in global carbon budgets. "We aim to uncover the patterns and mechanisms of greenhouse gas responses to warming in permafrost ecosystems, providing crucial data for improving climate projections," said Jia Gensuo, a co-author of the study.
