Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You

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Clive: Absolutely. I interest myself in all aspects of dogs. I’m a behavioural psychologist by training, but I try and keep up with different scientific approaches to understanding dogs. There are many different branches of science that contribute to trying to make sense of our dogs. So I read the genetics, and the geneticists have been doing work on dogs now. They decoded the whole dog genome about 15 years ago. And they’ve been going along, looking at the genetics of dogs and wolves and so on, and trying to identify how our dogs have changed genetically. Ultimately, anything that makes a species or some species unique has to be somehow written in their genetic code. That’s the ultimate, deepest level of analysis for living things, the genetic code. There's just something about dogs that makes you feel good. You come home, they're thrilled to see you. They're good for the ego." – Janet Schnellman All your dog wants is for you to show them the way," says Wynne, through compassionate leadership and positive reinforcement. One of these geneticists published a paper about a decade ago now, Bridget vonHoldt, where she compared the genetic code of wolves to the genetic code of dogs, and she looked to see any place where changes had occurred over the thousands of years since dogs came into being. And that paper contained a hint that there was a section of the dog DNA that showed evidence of having changed from wolves to dogs, and that in human beings if you had changes in that part of the DNA then you would have this syndrome called Williams Syndrome. Now Williams Syndrome is very, very rare, and it involves changes to about 28 genes, so a lot of genes are affected, and it has a wide range of impacts. People with Williams Syndrome have strange facial structure, they have heart defects, they have intellectual problems, they have a whole range of things. But the most intriguing to me was that people with Williams Syndrome are described in the medical literature as showing exaggerated gregariousness. In other words, they are exceptionally friendly. They very readily make new friendships. Chapter 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.

Clive: This is something I feel very strongly about. Most of the people I talk to never mean to be cruel to their dogs. We don’t intend to be cruel. We avoid punishing our dog, we avoid situations that cause pain for our dogs. But what I think we overlook is that we love our dogs precisely because they are such sociable beings and they want to be with us. We love them for that, and yet too many of us leave our dogs alone for too long. We take it for granted that a dog can just be left and it’ll be okay. This causes real distress to dogs. The most common behavioural problem that people seek help for is what we call separation anxiety. It’s not that there’s something wrong with the dog, it’s that there’s something wrong with the condition that we’re holding the dog under. We really shouldn’t be leaving our dogs alone for many, many hours a day. In Sweden it’s against the law to leave your dog alone for more than 4 hours a day. I don’t know that that’s entirely practical, but of course many people do have to work all day long and cannot get home in the middle of the day. So first of all we need to think about, does my life really have space for a dog? And secondly, if I cannot get home or somebody in the family cannot get home during the day, there are alternatives. You could engage a dog walker perhaps, a friend or neighbour who can pop round and spend some time with your dog, or a well-run dog daycare. That can also provide your dog with the social companionship that they essentially need to have satisfying and psychologically complete lives. It pains me how people think of their dog the same way they think of the other clever things they have around the house. The dog is a living being and a highly, highly social living being that needs to have company or else it’s going to be in psychological distress. No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as much as the dog does." – Christopher Morley, American journalist, novelist, and poetTo his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs." – Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World If you have a dog, you will most likely outlive it; to get a dog is to open yourself to profound joy and, prospectively, to equally profound sadness." – Marjorie Garber, author of Shakespeare After All Wynne guesses this happened 8,000 - 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, when humans began regularly hunting with dogs.

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. It also defends dogs against the contention that they are not as intelligent as we believe. Wynne explains in his book why it isn't a dog's intelligence that make it exceptional (although that's not to say they're stupid), it's their emotional capacity and hyper-sociability where they stand out in relation to other animals, and us. Dogs' lives are too short. Their only fault, really." – Agnes Turnbull, author of The Wedding BargainThe better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs." – Charles De Gaulle, President of the French Republic

Actually, my dog I think is the only person who consistently loves me all the time." – H. G. Bissinger, Pulitzer Prize winning American author and journalist But a new book argues that, when it comes to dogs, the word is necessary to understanding what has made the relationship between humans and our best friends one of the most significant interspecies partnerships in history. When you adopt a dog, you have a lot of very good days and one very bad day." – W. Bruce Cameron, author of A Dog's Purpose, A Dog's Journey, and A Dog's Way Home Does my dog love me or just my food? If you’ve asked yourself this question, you’re one of the thousands of dog owners who have wondered the same thing. Are they the ultimate scam artists, or do they truly love us?Clive Wynne, founder the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, makes the case in "Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You." 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.