By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – People unwilling to quit smoking to improve their own health may consider giving up cigarettes to spare their pets the harmful effects of second-hand smoke, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Twenty-eight percent of pet owners who smoke said in a survey they would try to quit based on knowledge that second-hand smoke could harm their dogs, cats and other pets, the researchers wrote in the journal Tobacco Control.

Another 11 percent said they would think about quitting.

“It’s not necessarily that people love their pets more than they love themselves or their children, it’s just another motivational factor for people to consider quitting smoking,” Sharon Milberger of the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, who led the research, said in a telephone interview.

Milberger said asking smokers to quit for the sake of their pets may be an appealing new way to get them to throw away their cigarettes. Of the 71 million pet owners in the United States, about a fifth are smokers, Milberger estimated.
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