Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You

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Dogs have a truly remarkable, really quite exaggerated, capacity to form strong emotional connections." Zazie: This question is from book club member Cathy Shamblin. She has a 13-week-old Kelpie who is learning to herd and has been following her dad Kelpie around the farm. She says, “Does ‘instinct’ inform a dog’s emotional ties to humans? Dogs have an instinctual bond to follow a leader. Do we humans get that instinct mixed up with love?” The poor dog, in life the firmest friend. The first to welcome, foremost to defend." – Lord Byron, poet of Epitaph to a Dog Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?" – Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Whether you’ve been gone for five minutes or five hours, one of the best parts of being a doggy parent is having that excited face greet you every time you reappear. Other highlights ranged from historical and scientific story leads to feelgood moments of lightness from Townshend's 'Darwin's Dogs' to the heartwarming Pedigree Hearts Aligned video which I had not seen before and am now very glad I have seen :DHumans don’t question their ability to love their dogs. We feed and exercise them, set our schedules based on their needs, get up with them in the middle of the night, buy them silly toys, and tell them our deepest secrets. Like many other much-loved humans, they believed that they owned their dogs, instead of realizing that their dogs owned them." – Dodie Smith, author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians Clive: Oh, just be with your dog, people! Don’t leave your poor dog alone. It’s funny we should end on that note. I really feel that very strongly. My dog doesn’t need me to talk to her or play with her all the time, but she wants to know where I am and be able to just touch base with me from time to time. I feel that so strongly. Everybody should have a shelter dog. It's good for the soul." – Paul Shaffer, Canadian musician, composer, actor, author, and comedian

CLIVE D.L. WYNNE, Ph.D., is the founding director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University. Previously, he founded the Canine Cognition and Behavior Laboratory at the University of Florida, the first lab of its kind in the United States. A native of the United Kingdom, Wynne has lived and worked in Germany and Australia as well as the United States and gives frequent talks to audiences around the world. The author of several previous academic books and of more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles that count among the most highly cited studies on dog psychology, he has also published pieces in Psychology Today, New Scientist, and the New York Times, and has appeared in several television documentaries about dog science on National Geographic Explorer, PBS, and the BBC. His latest book, Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in September. He lives in Tempe, Arizona. No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as much as the dog does." – Christopher Morley, American journalist, novelist, and poet We take it for granted that a dog can just be left and it’ll be okay. This causes real distress to dogs." The love of a dog is a pure thing. He gives you a trust which is total. You must not betray it." – Michel Houellebecq, French author No animal I know of can consistently be more of a friend and companion than a dog." – Stanley Leinwall

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The animal psychologist, 59, began studying dogs in the early 2000s, and, like his peers, believed that to ascribe complex emotions to them was to commit the sin of anthropomorphism—until he was swayed by a body evidence that was growing too big to ignore.

Chapter Five: Origins. This chapter is about some of the author's travels to look for early dogs, as well as his visits to fox and wolf shelters, and he talks about the differences between the Family Canidae. This chapter made me go on YouTube to watch some adorable fox videos.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. 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. I liked the depth and range of the book as it traversed many scientific paths, from the evolutionary origins of canine development to the latest in genetic and neuroscience research- including looking at wolves and Belyaev's and Trut's domesticated fox experiment (insert squeeee of happy memories of former readings here). The short answer: yes. Dogs do love us, and they show it in a lot of different ways. Signs Your Dog Loves You Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer." – Dean Koontz, author of False Memory

New advances in the sequencing of ancient DNA will allow scientists to discover when the crucial mutation to the gene that controls Williams syndrome occurred. 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? Dogs have boundless enthusiasm but no sense of shame. I should have a dog as a life coach." – Moby, American singer/songwriter and animal activist Whoever said you can't buy happiness forgot little puppies." – Gene Hill, author of A Hunter's Fireside Book and Hill CountrySara Ochoa, a veterinarian and veterinary consultant for DogLab, says that rubbing their face on their owners is another way dogs show their love through being physical. "It's a common way to show affection. By rubbing their face on you, your dog is marking you as theirs," said Ochoa. My fashion philosophy is, if you're not covered in dog hair, your life is empty." – Elayne Boosler, American comedian Summaries of some of these research findings are included below. They may or may not tell you whether dogs are capable of feeling this strong emotion, but the answer for every dog owner lies in your own personal definition of love. Is love defined as a strong bond, a show of affection, the desire to be with you always? I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it." – Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States 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.