Do Dogs Love Us?

It certainly seems so. They greet us with wagging tails. They lick our face and hands or wherever our flesh is exposed. And unlike wolves that avert their gaze, dogs make eye contact with us. They look at us steadily, seemingly with love.
         
But is there scientific research proving that dogs love us? Well, if not proof, compelling evidence that this is the case? The relevant experiments subjected dogs to an fMRI, which can image the flow of blood and oxygen to active parts of the brain. Of course, the dogs had to first be trained to lie still in the MRI machine. Then, because dogs have such a remarkable sense of smell, the canines were presented with five scents: that of their owner, a stranger, a dog from the same house, an unfamiliar dog, and their own scent. The researchers were focused on fMRI images of activity in the caudate nucleus, the brain’s reward center. They expected the strongest responses to occur when the canine subject smelled the scent of other dogs. Instead, the caudate nucleus “lit up” most when the scent was that of their owner. In other words, the dogs felt the most pleasure when smelling the scent of their owner. They liked their human more than other dogs!

Of course, it’s possible that the pooches associated their owners with food and treats, which would then be the “hidden” stimulus of the caudate. To test that hypothesis, the researchers—in another experiment—sometimes offered the canines hot dogs and sometimes praised them. They then compared the activation of the caudate nucleus when these different rewards were used. The vast majority of dogs reacted equally to hot dogs and praise. In other words, human praise—and presumably, the humans themselves—were at least as attractive to dogs as food. Moreover, 20% of the dogs reacted more strongly to praise. It’s not far-fetched to conclude that dogs love us at least as much as food. (The experiments described were done by Dr. Gregory Berns and are detailed in his book, How Dogs Love Us.)   

I’ll conclude with a poem from Dog Songs by Mary Oliver. Percy is, of course, her dog.

The Sweetness of Dogs
What do you say, Percy? I am thinking
of sitting out on the sand to watch
the moon rise. It’s full tonight.
So we go
 
and the moon rises, so beautiful it
makes me shudder, makes me think about
time and space, makes me take
measure of myself: one iota
pondering heaven. Thus we sit, myself
 
thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s
perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich
it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,
leans against me and gazes up into
my face. As though I were just as wonderful
as the perfect moon.
 
~ Richard Russell