Does Your Dog Really Love You?

Many people who own dogs (or almost any other pet for that matter) will tell you that they have a deep emotional connection to them. They love their pets. And as in any loving relationship, many pet owners have probably wondered from time to time whether their pet reciprocates the feeling does their dog love them as they love it, or is it just a meat robot programmed to eat, sleep and chase balls? A dog owner perhaps wouldn t give this question too much thought, after all, the dog appears to love them jumping up to lick their hand when they get home from wherever they've been, sitting at the foot of the bed staring adoringly at its owners, following them around the house. And to most people, that should be all that matters. If the dog appears to love me, why should I care whether the feeling is genuine? Life becomes much easier for the dog owner if they just believe their pet loves them, it makes the whole activity of dog-keeping much more bearable if you believe that you are doing it for the sake of a lover, rather than a mere automaton. But blindly accepting something based on what appears to be the case is not scientific. In order to give a more scientific answer to this question, we must first break it down into bite-size chunks, and deal with each one as an enquiry of its own.

So first we must ask: what is required for someone or something to love ? I would argue that at the most basic level, love relies on consciousness. It seems logical that for us to prove that something can love, we must first prove that it is at all capable of emotion, and for something to be capable of emotion, there must be something which can experience that emotion, and something which can experience something, i.e., it is aware of something, it how consciousness is often (and in my opinion best) defined¹. So how could we prove or disprove that animals are conscious? We might do well to start out a bit closer to home. We know that humans are conscious. On top of this, the current best theory of the origin of consciousness is that it arises as a result of a certain arrangement of neurones, i.e., our brains. This is backed up by the observation that physical changes to the arrangement of the neurones (brain damage) can cause changes to someone s conscious perception of the world at alters their consciousness. Nobody really knows exactly how neurones create consciousness, but the fact that they do has big implications. (We know that consciousness is not the product simply of the human brain because of cases such as that of Roger², who lost 95% of his cortex (he had extensive physical brain damage) and yet was still able to function normally in a social setting, despite losing much of his memory and his ability to taste and smell. This shows that consciousness is not simply a product unique to the human brain because Roger s brain did not resemble the human brain after it had been damaged, yet he retained his consciousness).Because what humans often like to forget, is that we too, are animals. Every feature of our bodies is simply a slightly adapted version of something from an ancestral animal . If we take the example of the skeleton, we can easily see this. The upper rear leg bone of a frog is a femur. So is the upper leg bone of a chicken, and of a human. We might not have the same skeletons, but we all have the same basic map femurs, ribs, etc , which all evolved from the same common ancestor of all life. In the same way, therefore, that it would be silly to believe that the human skeleton just popped into existence, totally unique and not preceded by anything similar to it, it is silly to assume the same of the human brain, and thus the human mind too. This is not to say that human consciousness is necessarily present in other animals, but rather it suggests that minds exist on a scale, with minds differing in nature between species with neural networks, as do other traits, rather than differing in their existence (put differently: consciousness itself is a binary trait which an animal either has or doesn't have you can t be more or less conscious, rather the nature of that consciousness (affected by the animal s physical form, emotions, etc ) differs between species.

So now that we have provided evidence that animals can (and probably do) possess consciousness, we can move on to the second part of the question: can animals experience emotion? Here, yet again, we would do well to rid ourselves of the usual anthropocentric assumption that the human brain is unique in all its features, because the fact that we share brain structures with other animals is very important here. Brain scans have shown that the areas of the brain responsible for producting emotions such as rage, happiness and fear are, as the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp says deep and very ancient circuits of the brain ³. This means that the nueral networks responsible for many emotions are believed to have evolved long ago, before humans existed. This is backed up by their existence in other animals just one example of this is that brain scans have shown that dogs with compulsive behaviours show the same brain abnormalities as humans with OCD⁴. Another important aspect of our perception of emotions is hormones and other chemicals. These are the chemical messengers which the body uses in order to give us direction as to what we should be doing, and they can be linked with certain emotional states. For example, humans suffering from clinical anxiety will show elevated levels of the hormone serotonin in their blood. An experiment was done with crayfish, in which normal, healthy crayfish were randomly given small electric shocks. This caused them to hide more, and they showed elevated levels of serotonin, which are both signs of the same form of anxiety we might see in humans. Furthermore, when they were given a drug which is commonly used to treat anxiety in humans (chlordiazepoxide), they returned to behaving normally. The researchers concluded from this, as you probably have, that crayfish exhibit a form of anxiety similar to that described in vertebrates ⁵(although you might have been thinking about one specific vertebrate, homo sapiens). We can t possibly know with absolute certainty whether a crayfish experiences the same emotion of anxiety as a human does. But, given that we know our brains are structurally very similar to the rest of the animal kingdom in many regards (even very primitive creatures, such as worms, have neurones of the same basic shape as ours, and also posses connectivity patterns also found in the human brain according to one research paper on the subject.⁶ ), and given that we know human emotion to be heavily linked to hormones and other chemicals (simply think how much a person s emotional state is altered by addictive drugs, or rushes of hormones like adrenaline), it surely seems reasonable that animals which share our brain structures and hormones would also be able to feel our emotions? Surely it would be less logical to assume that they can t feel the same emotions as us, which would necessitate claiming that emotion is not caused by chemicals or by the brain, but by an as of yet unknown cause, which we possess, but animals do not. This is not to claim that all human emotions are felt by all animals. If our ability to feel emotion is decided by the physical nature of our brains and our hormones, then it follows that the range of emotions which an animal feels will change depending on whether they have certain brain structures or hormones.

So we have established that animals are capable of consciousness, and if this is true can almost certainly experience the same emotions as us. So does your dog really love you? To answer the final part of this question, we need to look at dogs specifically. The scientific name of dogs is Canis Lupus Familiaris. The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed that the first part of that name, denoting the species Canis Lupus is the same as the species name of the grey wolf. This is because they are the same species (dogs are a subspecies of wolf). Dogs are wolves. Wolves are dogs. And dogs have, as such, retained many of the behavioural traits of wolves, most importantly for us, their pack instinct . Wild wolves rely strongly on their pack for survival, hunting with them, mating with them, socialising and playing with them. The security of a pack is based on its ability to stay together, which is largely a product of the wolves bonds how well they are able to care for each other. Wolves form very strong attachments to members of their pack, and have been recorded searching for dead relatives, or behaving erratically after the passing of a mate (in a similar to fashion to how humans and elephants grieve their dead). In humans, we would call an emotional connection which keeps individuals together and makes them grieve when the other is not present love . If this is what wolves (most likely) feel between pack mates, then it is surely what dogs feel towards us, their adopted pack mates.

But beyond the immediate question of does your dog love you , the ideas expressed in this essay have even more far reaching and consequential effects about our relationship with animals and the natural world, and our place in the universe. Our uniqueness is something which generations of scientists and philosophers have attempted to discover, and as more and more of their theories of what makes us special have been shown to be wrong (we now know that other animals are more intelligent than we thought, some can use language, use tools, sustain culture and a whole host of things which we would never have expected), many people have clung to our uniquely human consciousness and emotion as what makes us different. But this position fast being shown to be the product of anthropocentrism rather than being backed up with any real science. The time has come when we are no longer able to look at ourselves as above the rest of the animal kingdom, and praise ourselves as the wisest and greatest of all the life forms on earth. Instead, we must learn to accept our place in nature, and learn to love it back.

1^: Koch,C. 2014 Ubiquitous minds scientific American mind (1): 26-29

2: Philippi, C.L., et al. 2012 preserved self awareness following extensive bilateral brain damage to the insula, anterior cingulate, and medical prefrontal cortices PLoS ONE 7(8):1

3: deep and very ancient circuits : Panksepp, J. 2005 affective consciousness: core emotional feelings in animals and humans consciousness and cognition 14(l):30-80

4: Dogs, Humans Affected by OCD Have Similar Brain Abnormalities. Tufts Now, June 4. See also Ogata, N., et al. 2013. Brain Structural Abnormalities in Doberman Pinschers with Canine Compulsive Disorder. Progress in Neuro-
Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, no. 45:1 6

5: crayfish anxiety: Fossat, P., et al. 2014. Anxiety-Like Behavior in Crayfish Is Controlled by Serotonin. Science 344: 1293 97. See also Vignieri, S. N. 2014.
The Crayfish That Was Afraid of the Light. Science 344(6189): 1238

6: Emmons, S. W. 2012. The Mood of a Worm. Science 338: 475 76.