Dear Porky and Buddy,
It’s Valentine’s Day as I write this letter and I am wondering whether my dog, Henry, loves me.
No seriously, he acts like he does.
He follows me around looking all moony eyed and he is ludicrously happy when I come home from work and he snuggles up with me every night.
But is that just because I feed him?
Or, do dogs feel “love” for their humans?
Jo
Dear Jo,
In the not too distant past, when regular people talked about their pets loving them, animal behavioral scientists would get all snotty and accuse them of anthropomorphism – a fancy word that just means attributing human characteristics to non-humans, such as animals, like Henry.
So to avoid that label, animal behavioral scientists avoided research aimed at trying to answer your question.
But that has changed in recent years as scientists have begun to study the connection between people and animals in serious ways.
Here are a few examples of what we are learning.
A 2015 study in Japan found that when dogs and humans stare into each other’s eyes, they each register a spike of the so-called “love drug,” oxytocin.
For comparison, wolves rarely look people in the eye, and don’t appear to release oxytocin when they do.
Sounds like love to us.
Neuroscientist Gregory Berns, who scans dog brains, found in a 2014 study, that the canine brain lights up differently when a dog sniffs its owner.
He trained dogs to sit still in an fMRI machine to monitor a part of their brain called the caudate nucleus, which helps coordinate our neural ‘reward system.’
When the dogs sniffed their owner’s scent, the caudate nucleus lit up.
When the dogs sniffed other random humans or dogs, not so much.
Sounds like love to us.
Another fMRI study in Hungary found that human and dog brains appear to process emotionally-laden sounds in similar ways.
And a 2016 study found that dogs can recognize human emotions on our faces.
The researchers positioned pictures of happy and sad human faces in front of each test dog and played a happy or angry human voice in an unfamiliar language.
The dogs looked at the face that matched the tone of the voice more often.
Not love exactly, but evidence that dogs are attuned to their people in ways that have little to do with food.
So, the short answer is no one knows for sure.
And the long answer is that no one knows for sure yet but stay tuned.
And while you wait for an answer, if you love Henry and he brings you joy that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?
About Oswego County Humane Society
We provide services to promote and strengthen the human-animal bond through fostering-to-adoption programs, spay/neuter clinics, and humane education.
The Oswego County Humane Society is designated under IRS code 501(c)3 as a charitable organization: 161586001 and registered with the New York State Charities Bureau: 06-70-81.
Our registration number with the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets is RR239.
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