If doubts about pet love still haunt you, new research will dispel them.
It would seem that there is no doubt that dogs love their owners – what else can all these licks and tail wagging mean? However, scientists decided to dispel the last doubts by scientifically proving how much our pets love us, writes Live Science .
According to Arizona State University psychology professor and Canine University director Clive Wynn, he is absolutely convinced that “our dogs love us.” However, Newton Gregory Burns, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Georgia, went further and decided not to limit himself to words, but to study the canine brain.
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After the death of one of his favorite dogs, he decided to do some research. To do this, he initially taught his adopted dog Callie and other dogs involved in the experiment to calmly tolerate noise inside the MRI chamber, and then analyzed their brain activity.
During the study, he exposed dogs to a variety of odors, including familiar and unfamiliar people and dogs. The scientist found that all 12 animals participating in the study activated the olfactory zone of the brain, where they were offered things of this or that person, animal. However, the most curious thing happened when they were allowed to smell the things of the owners – at that moment the caudate nucleus lit up, an area that is associated with higher-level mental processes, for example:
- emotions;
- motivation;
- remuneration;
- romantic feelings.
The results of this study were published back in 2015. The following year, an additional study was conducted with 15 dogs. Then Burns found that 86% of the recipients showed a similar or higher level of caudate activation in response to praise than to food.
In the new study, Wynn and colleagues also found that pets tend to prefer their pets to food. To do this, they conducted an experiment: scientists placed a bowl of food and the owner, who had just returned from work, at a distance of 2 meters from the pets, and then the owner began to gradually move away. It turned out that in 8 out of 10 cases, the dogs preferred the owner’s food.
