People, pets and care homes: a story of ambivalence

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of pet ownership and its relationship to wellbeing in later life. In particular, the paper addresses the issue of pet ownership in communal residential settings for older people both now and in the past, comparing attitudes, policies, and practices in regard to pets in the late 1950s with the early years of the twenty‐first century.