Owning a dog may encourage older people to exercise. The headline was prompted by the results of a new study with the rather unsurprising finding that older adults who own dogs walk more than those who don’t. The study included around 80 adults with an average age of 70 from three regions in the UK, half of whom owned dogs. They wore activity monitors for three one-week periods spread over the course of a year. Dog owners walked around 22 minutes longer each day and were more likely to meet physical activity recommendations of 150 minutes of exercise a week. It seems plausible that owning a dog directly causes people to go out and walk when they wouldn’t otherwise do so. The study was carried out by researchers from several international institutions, including Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Lincoln in the UK, and State University of New York in the US. The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal BMC Public Health. The study’s authors only suggest that public health campaigns should encourage dog ownership to promote exercise. In any case, it’s exercise that’s important, and you don’t need a dog to do this. This was a cohort study where a sample of dog owners and non-dog owners, matched on sociodemographic factors, wore activity monitors for three weeks over the course of a year. The research aimed to see whether dog ownership has a direct effect on physical activity and sedentary behaviour in older adults. Such a study may well demonstrate that dog ownership has a direct effect on physical activity, but this isn’t really that surprising given that the need to walk a dog means a person goes for a walk when they may not have otherwise done so. This study included 43 dog owners and 42 non-dog owners over the age of 65. Dog owners and non-dog owners were matched by age, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Participants had activity data collected in three one-week periods spread evenly over the course of a year to capture a range of seasons (March to June, July to October, and November to February). They wore activity monitors and kept diaries reporting walking times and sleep/wake times during the assessment weeks. Researchers, blinded to whether the participants owned a dog or not, assessed walking times and looked at how they adhered with national physical activity recommendations (150 minutes a week of moderate physical activity). Eleven people dropped out of each of the two groups (25% drop out). But compliance with wearing the activity monitors for a full week in each assessment period was very high, at 92%. Two-thirds of participants were women, with an average age of 70 and an average body mass index (BMI) on the borderline of overweight (25.6kg/m2). Allowing for variance in dog ownership characteristics, dog owners walked for significantly longer than non-dog owners. Each day, they walked 2,762 additional steps, and walked 23 minutes longer in total and 21 minutes longer at a moderate walking pace. “The scale of the influence of dog ownership on [physical activity] found in this study indicates that future research regarding [physical activity] in older adults should assess and report dog ownership and/or dog walking status,” the researchers concluded. This relatively small observational study shows that dog owners over the age of 65 walk more than matched controls who don’t own dogs. This finding is perhaps not surprising, given that dogs need to be walked every day. People without dogs may not have this sort of incentive to get out walking.