Question: why do we keep some animals as pets....??

Hi bruce,

That’s an interesting question! Firstly, people have been keeping animals as pets for hundreds of years. Ancient civilisations even had pets. Many of these pets had functions beyond just being a companion though – the cats used to catch the rats for example.

There are lots of studies that show how pets help us stay happy and keep active and its one of the main reasons people keep dogs these days.

Now that brings me on to the other thing – why are some animals more suitable than others as pets? like dogs? well dogs are pack animals. They have behaviour that in a way is very similar to us. They live in families and want to please us. This makes them suitable for keeping as pets. There are other pets though, like snakes, rats, ferrets, hermit crabs etc which are pretty cool as well but definitely not as popular, probably because they have behaviours that are quite different to ours and most people don’t understand them as much. 🙂