Animal Lovers

At the beginning of the year, I asked the undergrads in my Animal Behavior class what they hoped to learn this semester. We discussed that Animal Behavior would cover the hows and whys of the entire animal kingdom, but they returned to their real question: "Sure, the bee waggle dance sounds cool, but does my dog love me?" I'm no stranger to this question, and probably neither are you. When it comes to dog love, two camps emerge: those who pose the question, and those wondering why anyone would bother asking the most obvious question on the planet. "Of course dogs love us!" scream the commenters in any article discussing dog love. Today is Valentine's Day. Hallmark holiday or no, today is the day we exchange heart-shaped objects at an excessive rate and discuss matters of the heart. If there's any day where it's okay to talk about dog love, today is that day. Do dogs love us, and how would we know? Looking at you Dog love is all the rage ...

Science has a way of making us think about our dogs in ways we wouldn’t otherwise think. But who would have thought that one of the coolest things we can learn about our dogs comes from something scientists just learned about cats? Source:  @myhoondal Recently we learned that dogs’ bodies produce oxytocin when in the presence of their human counterparts. Oxytocin is the hormone responsible for the human sensation of love. The levels of oxytocin in humans have been measured to show we produce more of it at certain times, like when we’re with our mates or offspring, or when we look at pictures like this: Source:  @prettygirldirtymind The testing of dog levels of oxytocin revealed they get big bursts of the hormone every time they make eye contact with their bonded humans. So science basically told us, “Hey, your dogs really do love you. We checked, and the test came back positive.” But cats, not so much. Cats don’t really fit into the love equation. Source:...