Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You

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Zazie: For those of us who live with pet dogs, what are the implications of dogs’ capacity for love in terms of how we care for them? Know that a dog's breed is not a completely accurate predictor for personality—each dog is unique, so take the time to get to know the dog before you make assumptions. Since dogs are highly dependent on their remarkable sense of smell to evaluate the world around them, animal cognition scientists decided to measure the canine brain’s response to the smell of familiar and unfamiliar people and dogs. They taught their subjects to lie still in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, so they could observe the dogs’ reactions to five different scents. When these dogs smelled the odor of their owners, as compared to other odors, the caudate nucleus (known as the reward center of the brain) showed activation. “This provides important clues about the importance of humans in dogs’ lives,” the researchers concluded. Zazie: Following on from that, because the book club were really interested in that topic, member Sarah MacLaren says, “I really enjoyed the book. I would be interested to know if any particular dog breeds express the Williams type behaviour more than others? (Not just in an anecdotal sense like the way we say Labradors are friendly).” So are some dog breeds examples of this more than others? Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Rather than telling them off, which feels like a rejection to them, try gently redirecting their attention towards one of the best dog chew toys to help them learn the behavior you expect of them.

Love Hormone

Kunuk Abelsen, a 27-year-old musher arrives at the island where his dogs are kept near Kulusuk, Greenland The short answer: yes. Dogs do love us, and they show it in a lot of different ways. Signs Your Dog Loves You

I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross, and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful, and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk." – Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-TimeChapter Two: What Makes Dogs Special? This is a chapter about how dogs came to be the way they are, and details some cognition experiments people have done with dogs. The author goes into more detail into his wolf enclosure adventure, and talks about some of the difference between dogs and wolves, especially with regard to tameness and their interest in humans. I really enjoyed this chapter, and it spurred me on to watch some absolutely adorable wolf videos on YouTube. This book is a wonderful addition to the dog science sub-genre, and a rejoinder to the occasional (and ignorant) canard that dogs are mere sycophants whose loyalty and affection is either feigned or misinterpreted by humans. Any dog owners suspects this is nonsense, but this book provides objective evidence why this isn't the case. Clive: It’s one of the lines of research that really show us the affectionate bond between people and their dog. I think of it in my own mind as how the heartbeat becomes synchronized, how they’re just so attuned with each other. Their whole biological systems are just attuning with each other. Now that we’re talking about it I wonder why nobody’s actually done an experiment combining those things. I think of it as connected to the research out of Japan where they look at the hormone oxytocin. People call oxytocin the love hormone because it spikes when two individuals are together and looking into each other’s eyes, individuals who have a very strong emotional connection, like mothers and infants or newly-enamoured couples; not old married couples but newly-enamoured couples. When they look into each other’s eyes you see these spikes in the levels of oxytocin, on both sides – the dog and the person. So the heart rate and the heart beat synchronization and the oxytocin studies are very similar lines of research. They point us very much in the same direction. They show us how, at a quite deep biological level, people and their dogs show this biological connection to each other.