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Regular physical activity is associated with numerous health benefits, including the prevention of many chronic diseases and conditions or a reduction in their adverse effects. Intervention studies suggest that promoting dog walking among dog owners who do not routinely walk their dogs may be an effective strategy for increasing and maintaining regular physical activity. Strategies that emphasize the value of dog walking for both dogs and people, promote the context-dependent repetition of dog walking, enhance the social-interaction benefits, encourage family dog walking, and ensure availability of public space for dog walking may encourage increased dog walking. Research also supports organizing buddy systems via "loaner" dogs to facilitate informal walking by dog owners and non-dog owners. Given the number of homes that have dogs, strategies that promote dog walking could be effective at increasing physical activity levels among a significant proportion of the population. Maximizing the potential for dog walking to positively influence the health of individual people (and dogs) will only occur through implementing programs with broad population-level reach. Policies that facilitate dog walking at the community and population levels, such as "dogs allowed" places, off-leash zones, and dog-friendly built environments and parks, may contribute to greater physical activity through dog walking.

BackgroundDog-owners tend to be more physically active than non-owners; however, dogs have also been shown to inhibit physical activity for non-owners, under some circumstances.MethodsWe conducted a scoping review to identify studies pertaining to the influence of dogs on physical activity for both dog-owners and non-owners, and adopted a critical realist orientation to draw inferences about the positive and negative impact of dogs via their affect on physical and social environments.ResultsWe identified 35 studies from disparate literatures for review. These studies confirm that dog and owner behaviors affect shared physical and social environments in ways that may influence physical activity patterns, not only among dog-owners but also among non-owners. The direction of influence appears to be most positive in neighborhoods exhibiting high levels of social cohesion, socioeconomic status, perceived safety, dominant culture, or all of these. In disadvantaged neighborhoods, the health of women as well as older adults may be disproportionately affected by dog and owner behavior.ConclusionsWhile dogs have the potential to increase physical activity for both dog-owners and non-owners, the presence or absence of dogs will not have a standard effect across the physical and social environments of all neighborhoods. Dogs' contributions to shared environments in ways that support physical activity for all must be leveraged. Thus, specific contextual factors must be considered in relation to dogs when planning neighborhood-level interventions designed to support physical activity. We suggest this population health topic merits further investigation.

This article contributes to the literature on One Health and public health ethics by expanding the principle of solidarity. We conceptualize solidarity to encompass not only practices intended to assist other people, but also practices intended to assist non-human others, including animals, plants, or places. To illustrate how manifestations of humanist and more-than-human solidarity may selectively complement one another, or collide, recent responses to Hendra virus in Australia and Rabies virus in Canada serve as case examples. Given that caring relationships are foundational to health promotion, people's efforts to care for nonhuman others are highly relevant to public health, even when these efforts conflict with edicts issued in the name of public health. In its most optimistic explication, One Health aims to attain optimal health for humans, non-human animals and their shared environments. As a field, public health ethics needs to move beyond an exclusive preoccupation with humans, so as to account for moral complexity arising from people's diverse connections with places, plants, and non-human animals.

I draw upon anthropological engagements with bioscience and embodiment in order to unpack current approaches to defining and preventing diabetes mellitus. The analysis stems from the conviction that carefully considering the symbolic frames through which we conceive of diseases, their origins, their distribution, and their consequences will assist us in planning and implementing interventions to improve population health. I argue that research and interventions focused on the sweetness of blood would benefit from rethinking intersections between diabetes, distress, and duress. In many instances, the lived experience of diabetes is consonant with an understanding of distress (i.e., "social suffering") that expands conventional understandings of population health problems. Diabetes incidence is rising worldwide, but it is rising especially rapidly in Aboriginal and other disadvantaged populations. Notably, diabetes is now three to five times more common in Canada's First Nations population than it is in its non-Aboriginal population. Yet as recently as 50 years ago, diabetes and associated health problems were rare in these groups. To come to grips with such transformations and disparities is to advance the population health research agenda.

Over one-third of older adults in many countries have a companion animal, and pets may harbor healthpromoting potential. Few studies have considered pet-ownership in relation to economic vulnerability, and pet-ownership has not been often considered within policy efforts to promote ageing-in-place. We conducted a mixed methods case study to understand perspectives of both community agencies that support ageingin-place and older adults themselves. A shortage of affordable, appropriate pet-friendly housing emerged as a challenge, even when framed as a legitimate choice and preference for many older adults. In this manuscript, we share the trajectories of three economically vulnerable older adults whose affordable housing needs became entangled with commitments to pets. Guided by dialogical narrative methodology, we offer each narrative as a short vignette to (i) illustrate the extent to which older adults will practice 'more-than-human solidarity' for a pet, even when their own well-being is compromised as a result; and (ii) highlight incongruence between the underlying moral values that shape solidaristic practices of individuals versus solidaristic arrangements that shape affordable housing opportunities. We suggest that housing rules and legislation that disrupt, rather than confirm, more-than-human solidarity may render older adults susceptible to, rather than protected from, deteriorating physical, mental and social well-being. We propose that collective solidaristic practices must reflect and subsume the moral complexity of solidarity practiced by individuals, to enable fair and equitable ageing-in-place.