Pet

Pets are becoming regular members of our families. Although they don't seem to understand what we mean(some dogs do it), they can be the counterparts of our talking to. Mentally, keeping pets helps us feel calm though the contacts of animals. In the stressful societies, they are apparently partners for us. Seeing-eye dogs or hearing dogs are already indispensable to those handicapped people. Furthermore, animals are also useful for curing emotional disabilities in medical field, called animal therapy. Although tame animals have been treated as pets, time has come when we have to regard as necessary social members not just as pets for our plaything.

There is no official statistics in the number of all of the pets kept in Japan, but according to the survey conducted by a pet-related association, in the combined figure of the most popular two pets, there are assumedly at least 15 million dogs and cats. Pets maniacs have the plural animals though, simply, at least one out of ten Japanese keep a dog or cat. To see only the data. Japan is a pet-friendly country. As for keeping dogs, it's obligatory for the owners to register the pets to town offices within 30 days(over 90 days year-old dogs) after starting to keep them according to the Rabies Prevention Law. In the regulations, your dogs should be injected to prevent rabies and you are given dog tugs and injection certifications or so. Moreover you put the seals as marks you keep dogs around the entrance doors to be seen from outside. When it comes to keeping any other animals, the regulations differ by each local government.

There are, of course, some risks to keep pets. Thankful to the strict regulation to prevent rabies, since the prevention law came into effect in 1957, no rabies-related disease have been found in Japan. Many other cases of zoonosis than rabies, however, still exist. It's said that there are more than 100 zoonosis, and even in the pet-related ones such as dogs and cats are about 30 kinds in Japan. What is a little worrying one is echinococcus. The host of the zoonosis is one type of fox that live only in Hokkaido. We could be contaminated through mouse by wind or eating edible wild plants. After about ten-year period of showing no symptoms, the kidneys, lungs or even brains are heavily damaged. Since echinococcus was discovered in Hokkaido in 1937, more than 350 patients have been reported. Many of them have died seemingly from the disease.

Although it was believed to exist only in Hokkaido, in 1999, echinococcus was found from the meat of a peg amazingly in the northeast prefecture of the main land. It might be invading all over the land. This is the case happening only inside Japan. From now on, in company with the globalization, more foreign diseases may come into Japan.

Lets get to cleaned-up pets! As long as you live in apartments, it’s difficult to keep pets in Japan. Although some of the apartment are allowing to do so, the strict codes of many apartments still ban the residents to keep them for the reason that there must be troubles in apartments. Not all of the tenants do like animals.

Keeping pets in Japan has some risks and difficulties as you see above. If you really want to keep pets as talking friends and at the same time avoid the risks and trouble, you better buy computerized animals. No sooner a Japanese giant electronics maker put it into the market, than all of the products had sold out instantly although the price was highly expensive (150,000 yen) for toys. This pet robot reacts to the keeper's actions and its movements are very lovely because of the varieties. There are almost no risks in zoonosis and troubles in apartments. As some dogs suddenly assault the pet owners for stresses or misunderstanding the pet-owner relationships upside-down, the robot may not attack you either. Here might be a new risk that human beings are kept by robot pets in the future.