05/12/2020
It’s at least worth thinking about that what on the surface appears to be something in our dogs that people are happy to call love might — might — not have deserved that name. It could have been that our dogs were in some sense just faking it to get better treats. Ultimately, this is, to me, about trying to understand the secret of dogs’ success and what makes dogs unique.
Scientists in the first decade of the 21st century were mainly concerned with the idea that dogs have special forms of intelligence and social cognition that were unique in the animal kingdom. From the point of view of those of us that are in the science of studying dogs, the idea that it’s affection and not intelligence that’s the secret ingredient that makes dogs successful is quite a radical idea.
What is love? Don’t we need a clear definition?
I avoid using the L-word in my scientific writing. We talk about exceptional gregariousness. We talk about hypersociability. When we’re doing science, we have to find terms that can be operationalized, or things that can be measured. We can measure whether a dog chooses to go for a bowl of food or its owner when it’s separated from both food and its owner for many hours. We can measure how hormonal levels go up in both dogs and their owners when they look into each other’s eyes.
At the end of the day, an overarching, multidimensional phenomenon like love has to be broken down into small, measurable pieces. But I think if one were to just do science on the small, measurable pieces and resist the attempt to synthesize all those observations into a picture, that would be a disservice.
Model:Picci