Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You

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The best way to get a puppy is to beg for a baby brother—and they'll settle for a puppy every time." – Winston Pendleton, author of Pursuit of Happiness Every dog lover knows the feeling. The nuzzle of a dog’s nose, the warmth of them lying at our feet, even their whining when they want to get up on the bed. It really seems like our dogs love us, too. But for years, scientists have resisted that conclusion, warning against anthropomorphizing our pets. Enter Clive Wynne, a pioneering canine behaviorist whose research is helping to usher in a new era: one in which love, not intelligence or submissiveness, is at the heart of the human-canine relationship. Drawing on cutting-edge studies from his lab and others around the world, Wynne shows that affection is the very essence of dogs, from their faces and tails to their brains, hormones, even DNA. This scientific revolution is revealing more about dogs’ unique origins, behavior, needs, and hidden depths than we ever imagined possible. There is no faith which has never yet been broken, except that of a truly faithful dog." – Konrad Lorenz, zoologist I once decided not to date a guy because he wasn't excited to meet my dog. I mean, this was like not wanting to meet my mother." – Bonnie Schacter, founder of the Single Pet Owner's Society Singles Group

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 I loved reading about what makes dogs love humans, both genetic (Williams syndrome, I had no idea) and hormonal, and about how dogs did and didn't evolve from wolves. But the ending made me laugh out loud. 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. Know that a dog's breed is not a completely accurate predictor for personality—each dog is unique, so take the time to get to know the dog before you make assumptions. 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.It also means carving out time to meet their social needs instead of leaving them isolated for most of the day. Finding out how variation of expressions of human orientated behaviour between individual dogs, within breeds, relates to different gene developments and whether they had the AA oxytocin receptor gene versus the GG or the AG oxytocin receptor gene but that breed could also impact on how the peptide oxytocin levels interrelated with different gene combinations and behaviour responses. It would be really interesting to follow more studies in this area. Clive Wynne, a canine behaviorist and founding director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University in Tempe, has always loved dogs, but it took him many years to become convinced that the feeling is reciprocated. In Dog Is Love, readers accompany Wynne on his scientific journey from skeptic to believer. Not only do dogs love us, he argues, but it is their capacity and desire to connect with humans that makes dogs unique. 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

I liked its exploration of dogs around the world as they live within different human and canine interrelationship structures, from Moscow, Ethiopia's and India's stray dogs, to the hunting dogs of the Mayangnan people and how findings on canine evolutionary and behavioural patterns could be seen here - at the same Wynne empathically and strongly highlights the duty of care we have and how and where we fall down. Don’t mind me. Just tearing up as I read the end of this book with my 8-year-old pup lying next to me. And indeed my own dog wasn’t a puppy when we got her. She was already 14 months old when she became part of our family. And yet if you were to come and visit now, you would never for a moment guess that she hadn’t always been with me. It’s very obvious how much she cares about me and my wife and my son. So dogs can much more easily move into new relationships, which is a great thing because otherwise what would we do with adult dogs who’ve lost their original human family? It would really be a problem. It would be difficult to go to an animal shelter and adopt a dog that’s already an adult, if it were the case that dogs grieve like people do and take years to recover from losing beloved family members. I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that dogs get tired of the people they live with and love, no. All I’m saying is that I think if a dog is forced to move on to a new human being that they can more readily do that than we would expect to see in our own species.Zazie: For those of us who live with pet dogs, what are the implications of dogs’ capacity for love in terms of how we care for them? One involved researchers using a rope to pull open the front door of a dog's home and placing a bowl of food at an equal distance to its owner, finding that the animals overwhelmingly went to their human first. A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.” In genetics, UCLA geneticist Bridgett vonHoldt made a surprising discovery in 2009: Dogs have a mutation in the gene responsible for Williams syndrome in humans—a condition characterized by intellectual limitations and exceptional gregariousness. At first I kind of intellectually resisted that. I mean I didn’t resist it in my personal feelings or anything, I mean I loved her, but I resisted taking that seriously as part of trying to understand what makes dogs so remarkable and so special. Until one day I just kind of gave in, and I thought well, let’s take this affectionate position seriously, let’s look at this seriously. Animals do have emotional bonds, obviously usually with their own species. Let’s consider from a critical, scientific view, the possibility that what’s going on with dogs is that they have an amazing capacity to form strong emotional bonds. And as soon as I took that possibility seriously, then as you know, what I describe in the book Dog Is Love, it became so clear that that really is what makes dogs the amazing beings that they are. It’s not their intelligence. For all that I’ve met some smart dogs, dogs really don’t have special forms of intelligence that other species don’t have. But they do have a truly remarkable, really quite exaggerated, capacity to form strong emotional connections. And that’s all because of Xephos, who’s here right now paying no attention. She taught me that.

Dogs' lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you're going to lose a dog, and there's going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can't support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There's such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware that it comes with an unbearable price." – Dean Koontz, author of False MemoryZazie: I really enjoyed reading about your research on shelter dogs, some of it with Lisa Gunter. What practical things have you found that shelters can implement to help dogs in their care? As someone who loves dogs and lives with 3 of them, I have read a LOT of books about dogs so I can understand them better. A lot of the material in this book will be familiar to those who also read about dogs or watch specials about them on PBS (e.g. the 'who stays longer in a circle" experiment comparing wolves and dogs, or the breeding of foxes for tameness). However, the discussion of genetics and oxytocin receptors was new to me and fascinating.

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. Clive: It’s one of the lines of research that really show us the affectionate bond between people and their dog. I think of it in my own mind as how the heartbeat becomes synchronized, how they’re just so attuned with each other. Their whole biological systems are just attuning with each other. Now that we’re talking about it I wonder why nobody’s actually done an experiment combining those things. I think of it as connected to the research out of Japan where they look at the hormone oxytocin. People call oxytocin the love hormone because it spikes when two individuals are together and looking into each other’s eyes, individuals who have a very strong emotional connection, like mothers and infants or newly-enamoured couples; not old married couples but newly-enamoured couples. When they look into each other’s eyes you see these spikes in the levels of oxytocin, on both sides – the dog and the person. So the heart rate and the heart beat synchronization and the oxytocin studies are very similar lines of research. They point us very much in the same direction. They show us how, at a quite deep biological level, people and their dogs show this biological connection to each other. Friendly dogs are adaptable to new situations and environments. They are easy to train and not terribly excitable all the time. When a dog gets overly excited, they're no longer attentive and become challenging to reign in. An active and playful dog is wonderful, but dogs need to understand limits and play without becoming too rough. A friendly dog usually does not get fearful or anxious; they accept and follow your calm energy or leadership into a situation. I think there comes a point when it's worth being skeptical of your skepticism," the Englishman said in an interview with AFP. The same points are made over and over, perhaps because there aren't a lot of points to make but the fact is, each one is quite compelling. No need to write a long book with anecdotal and emotional filler, when a short book with clever summaries of compelling science (and humour -- could we please have a bit of humour?) will capture readers' attention and change OUR behaviour.Everybody should have a shelter dog. It's good for the soul." – Paul Shaffer, Canadian musician, composer, actor, author, and comedian They share their toys. Your dog might sometimes tease you with their toy when they want to play, but in a true gesture of affection, they’ll present it as a gift. They want to share their most prized possession with the person they care about. Sounds like a whole lot of love.