Dogs are great, and caring for a canine often comes with plenty of benefits. They make us laugh, keep us from being bored, and are often quite skilled at the art of snuggling, but new research just proved that owning a dog actually reduces your chances of dying by a significant margin.
Past studies have suggested that dog (and cat) owners are happier overall, and some of the data has pointed to longer life, but none of the research was even close to definitive. This new project is absolutely massive in scale, and the team of scientists conducting it have drawn their conclusions from a whopping 3.4 million individual data points, giving its outcome some serious weight.