Does Your Dog Really Love You?

• Author: Wade, Nicholas

Or is canine devotion a scam?

When you get home from school, your dog bounds up to you, jumps up, licks you, and wags its tail feverishly. Other friends may come and go, but your dog truly loves you--right?

Wrong, according to recent research in the field of animal behavior.

Dogs are con artists, says Stephen Budiansky, author of If a Lion Could Talk, a book about how animals interact with people. Dogs are experts at manipulating human emotions. They "pick our pockets clean," he says, "and leave us smiling about it."

For example, when you yell at your dog for soiling the carpet and he cringes, you are probably calmed by his obvious regret. That regret may be obvious, but is it sincere? No, Budiansky says.

"The cringe is a successful technique for deflecting aggression," Budiansky writes in a recent Atlantic Monthly magazine article. Dogs inherited a sharp sensitivity to social cues from their wolf ancestors, he says, and have fine-tuned their behavior with people over thousands of years.

Human beings also interpret other programmed behaviors, such as protectiveness, and "read into them extravagant tales of love and fidelity," Budiansky says. However, when a dog barks at an intruder or other perceived danger, what's really happening is that the dog is feeling protected by us (we're his pack leaders, after all), and feels emboldened to react to the threat.

...