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. It's far less romantic than the popular notion of hunters who captured wolf pups and then trained them, which Wynne derides as a "completely unsupportable point of view" given the ferocity of adult wolves who would turn on their human counterparts. It’s worth noting that which love language your pet speaks can influence the way they show their love for you. So while one dog may bring you household items and toys as gifts to demonstrate their affection for you, others may prefer to curl up next to you on the couch. Humans 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.

If you don’t like someone or they make you feel threatened or uncomfortable, then chances are you won’t be spending much time staring deeply into their eyes. The same goes for dogs - eye gazing is an attempt at bonding and something that all of us (humans and dogs alike) reserve for those we love. 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 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. 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. Phylogeny = evolutionary history (or more precisely 'the evolution of a genetically related group of organisms)Lively and fascinating ... The reader comes away cheered,better informed, and with a new and deeper appreciation for our amazing canine companions and their enormous capacity for love.”—Cat Warren, New York Timesbest-selling author of What the Dog Knows Pigeons can identify different kinds of objects in 2D images; dolphins have shown they understand grammar; honeybees signal the location of food sources to each other through dance; all feats that no dogs have ever been known to accomplish. The essential thing about dogs, as for people with Williams syndrome, is a desire to form close connections, to have warm personal relationships—to love and be loved," writes Wynne. A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself." – Josh Billings, humorist and lecturer I know that sometimes Xephos just wants dinner. But I’m pretty convinced that that’s not the whole picture. She really does feel a bond, a connection toward me that’s as real as any other connection that any other individual in my life might feel toward me.

So there’s a whole bunch of things. I’m always concerned to find ways of helping dogs in shelters that are easily deployed. Sometimes I worry, because I spend a lot of time talking to expert dog trainers and people who really know what they’re doing, and sometimes I worry that we tend to easily come up with solutions that are too difficult for a typical shelter to implement. There are wonderful shelters around the country, but there are a lot of shelters that just don’t have the resources to bring in experts and we need to help the dogs in those kinds of shelters, which is the larger number of dogs across the country, by coming up with solutions that are really simple, that cost as little as possible to implement. And yet not spending time trying to guess what breeds the dogs are, doesn’t cost anything, it’s not doing something. Fostering doesn’t need to cost a shelter money, and throwing in treats is also a very low cost solution. So we’re always on the lookout for those kinds of low-cost, low-effort solutions to help the poor dogs. It’s not their fault that they ended up in these places. You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.” A well-trained dog will make no attempt to share your lunch. He will just make you feel so guilty that you cannot enjoy it." – Helen Thomson, writer and consultant with New Scientist Magazine and Best Science Journalist in the British Journalism Awards 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. 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 MemoryIf a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals." – Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist Lively and fascinating... The reader comes away cheered, better informed, and with a new and deeper appreciation for our amazing canine companions and their enormous capacity for love.”—Cat Warren, New York Times best-selling author of What the Dog Knows Magnetic resonance imaging has drilled down on the neuroscience, showing that dogs' brains respond to praise as much or even more than food.

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 have given us their absolute all. We are the center of their universe. We are the focus of their love and faith and trust. They serve us in return for scraps. It is without a doubt the best deal man has ever made." – Roger A. Caras, author of A Dog Is Listening: The Way Some of Our Closest Friends View Us You know, a dog can snap you out of any kind of bad mood that you're in faster than you can think of." – Jill Abramson, American author and journalist, and former executive editor of The New York TimesIt 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. Kunuk Abelsen, a 27-year-old musher arrives at the island where his dogs are kept near Kulusuk, Greenland 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 Memory Dogs are generally friendly animals. When dogs were domesticated thousands of years ago, it was in their best interest as they evolved to woo humans for food and shelter. And while every dog has a unique personality, certain breeds tend to be a little more sociable than others, including, the pug, the Labrador retriever, the Boston terrier, and the poodle. An interview with Prof. Clive Wynne about his wonderful new book, Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You , about how he came to realize that what’s special about dogs is not their intelligence, but their capacity for love. Dog Is Love was the Animal Book Club’s for October 2019 and was also on my winter reading list.

I think dogs are the most amazing creatures; they give unconditional love. For me, they are the role model for being alive." – Gilda Radner, American comedian and actress Sara 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. Current Biology: “Voice-Sensitive Regions in the Dog and Human Brain Are Revealed by Comparative fMRI.” All dogs go to heaven because dogs are naturally good and loyal and kind." – Melba Moore as Whippet Angel in All Dogs Go To HeavenZazie: There’s a really lovely section in the book about the heartbeat of the dog and their owner becoming aligned, which was based on some research by Mia Cobb and a colleague. How does this happen, and what does it tell us about the relationship between a dog and their person? Chapter Two: What Makes Dogs Special? This is a chapter about how dogs came to be the way they are, and details some cognition experiments people have done with dogs. The author goes into more detail into his wolf enclosure adventure, and talks about some of the difference between dogs and wolves, especially with regard to tameness and their interest in humans. I really enjoyed this chapter, and it spurred me on to watch some absolutely adorable wolf videos on YouTube. Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day.