Yes, your dog loves you!

Recently “Scientific American” published an article about whether or not your dog can reciprocate love. The final conclusion from the article was that, no, dogs don't love us and that it is all explained with behavioral science. As a dog owner since childhood, and I have had the good fortune of having a few really cool dogs, I think the article is wrong on two fundamental points. (1) There is no comprehensive definition of love and the criteria used for study is far to narrow and (2) the criteria for measuring it is based solely on human behavior.

Let's first look at love. What is love? If you have a clear cut definition of what love is, then you have attained what poets and philosophers have been seeking to articulate for thousands of years. The fact is that there are all sorts of love and they all manifest differently and uniquely for different people. It seems no two people can love each other the same as any other two people. Love changes over time as well. It is an amorphous thing that can take many different forms at different times. How do you really know anyone loves you? Its not easy. With love being so different and hard to measure between human beings, do we really think that it would be easy to detect and quantify between humans and dogs?

Assuming we had an easy definition to work from, love is not something that can be measured easily. It is like the weather or earthquakes. We know the general science i.e. psychology and biology, but there are so many factors that are missed, misunderstood, or are immeasurable but which have such great impact, that we can't fully understand or predict love. (characterized by the expression: “The heart wants what it wants.”) We are therefor left with vague definitions of love and reduced to what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”

Dogs are not human and we should stipulate up front that they do not feel human emotions. As red-blooded vertebrates with nervous and endocrine systems similar to ours, they do feel emotions. They are, like us, social animals, and there is evidence that “friendship” is an evolutionary trait in social animals. It is not unreasonable to expect that a dog may have emotions similar to friendship or love. We have also observed that dogs have the ability to form bonds with different individuals. These bonds can manifest as different behaviors for different individuals. This supports what we believe we see in human dog bonds and relationships. It is not unreasonable to theorize that the same biological mechanics that come in to play when humans form emotional bonds may also come into play when dogs do the same thing.

For the first part, I think the study in “Scientific American” fails because it does not embrace a broad enough understanding of the emotion of love and too narrowly constrains the experiment. There is more then enough evidence to accept that dogs can feel the emotions of affection. I think it is inarguable that dogs can and do exhibit unique play behaviors in the presence of individuals with whom they have formed special bonds. Is this not akin to affection? It certainly seems to pass the “I know it when I see it” test.

Second, the behavior used as a measure in the study is a human behavior. There is no reason to expect that dogs and humans would have the same instinctual emotional behaviors. To judge a dogs love within the context of human behaviors is almost certain to fail.

What the study did not do, and this is paramount to any understanding of the dog/human bond is to first understand dog emotions and behaviors associated with them. The article had no information of any such prerequisite. To know if a dog loves a person, we must first know if dogs can feel “love.” As previously asserted, lets assume that dogs can and do have a set of emotions that are akin to human affection and love. What does it look like?

If we can not define a set of behaviors that are appropriate indicators for affection or love in dogs, how can we test if they are exhibited between dogs and humans with a close bond?

Also, dogs perceive humans differently than humans perceive dogs. A dog uses his sense of smell and hearing more than sight to understand individuals. The tests between a human and dog are different because the test only dealt with human perception of the situation and not the dog's. The situation was far different for the dog than it was for the child.

For the second part, I think the study in the “Scientific American” article fails because there is inadequate understanding of animal behaviors, specifically dogs, and the test took a far too anthropomorphic view of canine behaviors.