Research on dogs has exploded in recent decades. Universities have opened canine cognition labs, and scientists have probed dogs’ intelligence, behavior, biology, and skills.
Clive Wynne, a psychologist and founder of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, released a book that walks readers through the growing body of dog science. In it, he argues that what makes dogs remarkable is not their smarts, but their capability to form sincere relationships with other species — in short, to love.
Wynne spoke with The Washington Post in 2019 about his book, Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Washington Post: Many dog owners will think, “Of course my dog loves me.” Why study this?
Wynne: 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 its affection and not intelligence that’s the secret ingredient that makes dogs successful is quite a radical idea.
Q: What is love? Don’t we need a clear definition?
A: I avoid using the L-word in my scientific writing. We talk about exceptional gregariousness. We talk about hyper sociability. 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.
Q: You and I have had conversations in the past where I got the impression you would be on the more skeptical end of the dogs-love-us spectrum.
A: I’m a reluctant convert. I was resistant to the idea that what appeared to be affection radiating from our dogs could be that. But ultimately, a combination of getting this dog into my life — who’s lying down next to me now, Xephos — and the overpowering evidence of the studies that my students and I did, and the studies that so many other people have done, it really all adds up to an irresistible picture. I know that sometimes Xephos just wants dinner. But I’m pretty convinced that that’s not the whole picture. She 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.
Q: So dogs’ intelligence — cognitive skills that make them uniquely able to understand us — is not their secret?
A: I thought it was a fair enough idea when I started studying dogs: Maybe dogs had developed special forms of cognition by living with people for 15,000 years.
The aha moment came when we got an invitation from Wolf Park in Indiana. Wolf Park has been hand-rearing wolves since 1974. When we’re testing wolves, we’re testing the wild ancestor of dogs, and it’s a crucial way to see what makes dogs unique because we’re seeing what differences are there. We got around to having the wolves there tested in this very simple task where you point at something on the ground and see if the animal goes where you point. This was believed to be something unique to dogs, and sure enough, the wolves were excellent at it. That was the aha moment — it couldn’t be how dogs were unique.
Subsequently, we and other people have tested goats and dolphins, and even bats. Bats raised by people follow human pointing gestures, and bats raised by other bats do not. What matters is your early experience in life. That’s what determines whether an animal will be sensitive to what people are doing.
Q: You also write about how biological research backs up the idea that dogs can love.
A: If it’s there, it’s got to be in their biology. Their biology has to underwrite their behavior.
A Japanese research group analyzed dogs’ and people’s urine for levels of this hormone oxytocin, which gets called the love hormone because it spikes when two people are in loving contact with each other. They had people and dogs come into the lab and look at each other lovingly. Sure enough, the oxytocin levels went up on both sides of the relationship.
If you show dogs in MRI scanners objects that remind them of either food or the presence of their owners, you can see how their brains light up. And the reward centers of the brain light up more strongly to signals that say “Your owner is nearby” than to signals that say “You’re going to get a piece of sausage.” That’s really strong evidence inside the brain that the presence of a beloved human is rewarding to a dog in itself.
The more biological side that I’ve been entangled in is digging right down to the genetic code. In part of the genome of the dog that shows evidence of recent changes, the equivalent part of the human genome is accountable for this syndrome called Williams-Beuren. The most peculiar symptom is what they call exaggerated gregariousness. People who have this syndrome have no notion of strangers, they treat everybody as a friend, and they’re extremely outgoing. When I read this, I thought: They’re much like our dogs!
So some people got together and did these very simple behavioral tests for what you could call gregariousness or sociability on dogs and wolves. And we got DNA samples from those dogs and wolves, and we recognized three genes that show the mutation in those genes [is] responsible for a big difference between dogs and wolves in their gregariousness. Dogs are much more outgoing, and this correlates with three genes that independently are responsible for the gregariousness aspect of Williams syndrome. So deep into the deepest level of biology, into the genetic code that underlies everything that dogs become, you can find it all the way through.
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