ARGUMENT129

TOPIC: ARGUMENT129 - The following appeared in the Sherwood Times newspaper.
"A recent study reported that pet owners have longer, healthier lives on average than do people who own no pets. Specifically, dog owners tend to have a lower incidence of heart disease. In light of these findings, Sherwood Hospital should form a partnership with Sherwood Animal Shelter to institute an 'adopt-a-dog' program. The program would encourage dog ownership for patients recovering from heart disease, which will help reduce medical costs by reducing the number of these patients needing ongoing treatment. In addition, the publicity about the program will encourage more people to adopt pets from the shelter, which will reduce the risk of heart disease in the general population."
WORDS: 429 TIME: 00:30:00 DATE: 2008/8/8 1:46:09

In this argument, the auther draws a conclusion that the pet owners have longer healthier lives on average than others and the program will reduce the risk of heart disease in the general population. It is merely based on the unfounded assumption and dubious evidence. At first glance, the argument seems somewhat convincing, but further meditation reveals that it omits some important concerns that should be addressed to support the argument. In my point of view, it suffers from 3 logical flaws.

To begin with, the result of the survey is not convincing and reliable, unless the arguer illustrated a sufficient number of examples and covered the entire spectrum. And the argument alleges that dog owners tend to have a lower incidence of heart disease in order to establish the direct relationship between the rate of heart disease and whether one owns pets unfoundedly. Perhaps there are other possibilities, such as lack of sleep, hard smoking or drinking, might just as likely be the cause of heart disease. Therefore, owning a dog cannot be a sufficient condition for lower incidence of heart disease.

Although the pets can prevent their owners from high incidence of heart disease, they cannot be used for patients recovering from heart disease. It is possible that adopting pets, such as a dog, can only keep us from the heart disease rather than recover from it. Perhaps, the patients, who have heart disease, will get worse and worse due to the 'adopt-a-dog' program. And there is no evidence that the program will save the costs for the patients needing ongoing treatment. Perhaps the costs of adopting a dog will offset or even exceed the money on treatment.

Finally, although adopting pets have good efforts on patients' recovering, we cannot expand these methods to the general population. It is possible that the pets may bring some other viruses which do harms to people. It is possible that most of people do not like pets at all, even if the pets have so many advantages. So the risk of heart disease in the general population will not decrease absolutely as the arguer predicts.

In a word, the arguer fails to assert its claim that the pet owners have longer healthier lives on average than others and the program will reduce the risk of heart disease in the general population. In addition, the arguer would have to provide more information in order to make the argument more convincing. Therefore, if the argument had considered the given factors and possibilities discussed above, it would have been more thorough and logically acceptance.