Why do we love dogs and they love us back so much?
Posted on September 18, 2022 • 3 minutes • 573 words
We have become so good in understanding dog language than we think. We may not be fluent as we are not dogs, but we can tell the difference between a nervous yip from a menacing growl, a bark that says hello vs a bark that says get lost. We can tell when a dog is happy, sad, playful, hungry, in pain, scared etc.
Don’t believe me? OK, can you tell the difference between a happy bird and a sad bird? Happy lion vs sad lion? But you can in case of a dog.
We have learnt the dog language by seeing the dogs around us. We didn’t try explicitly for it as with the human language. We have also lived with cattle, horses, cats, pigs, hen etc but we didn’t understand their language as well as we did with dogs. Our lives are so entangled with dogs from so long ago that we can’t disentangle them again.
There are symbiotic relationships in this world too that are entirely on a give and take basis but there is no love part in them. The symbiotic relationship between an anemone (Heteractis magnifica) and a clownfish (Amphiron ocellaris) is a classic example of two organisms benefiting the other; the anemone provides the clownfish with protection and shelter, while the clownfish provides the anemone nutrients in the form of waste while also scaring off potential predator fish.
But dogs and humans adore each other.
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| Photo byDEVN / Unsplash |
This relationship was forged starting 14,000 years back but some finds say that it may be twice as old as that.
Dogs and wolves have 99.9% same mitochondrial DNA - that’s passed by the mother alone. This makes the two species nearly indistinguishable. But there are three genes in chromosome six in particular that code for hyper-sociability. They are in the same spot as similar genes linked to similar sweetness in humans.
Our ancestors didn’t know what genes were many millennia ago, but they know that the midsize scavengers with long muzzles came nosing around their campfires would gaze at them with a certain attentiveness, loving neediness. It’s hard to resist that. They welcomed them and eventually called them dogs, while those that didn’t come to them were called wolves etc.
If you didn’t need a working dog—and fewer and fewer people did—the ledger went out of balance. We kept paying dogs their food-and-shelter salary, but we got little that was tangible in return. Never mind, though; by then we were smitten.
Today, at least in areas populated by humans, dogs are the planet’s most abundant terrestrial carnivore. There are about 900 million of them worldwide, just shy of 80 million of whom live in the U.S. alone. The single species that is the domestic dog—Canis lupus familiaris—has been subdivided into hundreds of breeds, selected for size or temperament or color or cuteness.
What began as a mutual-services contract between two very different species became something much more like love. None of that makes a lick of sense, but it doesn’t have to. Love rarely touches the reasoning parts of the brain. It touches the dreamy parts, the devoted parts—it touches the parts we sometimes call the heart. For many thousands of years, it’s there that our dogs have lived.
This article is an excerpt from TIME How Dogs Think: Inside the Canine Mind .
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