Study: why people love dogs more than other people

Some dog owners love their four-legged pets so much that they care for them like children - and sometimes, by their own admission, prefer their company to friends and family. New research explains why.

Фото: Depositphotos

A study published in the journal Society and Animals suggests that people are more sensitive to dogs than to other people, writes Travel and Leasure.

In the experiment, 240 students were shown fake newspaper clippings of a non-existent police report of an attack on a person or a dog. In the report, the victim was attacked by a “stranger with a baseball bat” and left unconscious “with a broken leg” and “multiple lacerations.”

Participants were shown virtually identical reports, in which the victim was either a one-year-old child, a 30-year-old adult, a small puppy, or a six-year-old dog. They were then asked about how they felt and the responses were used to measure their level of empathy. At first, experts assumed that participants would determine the vulnerability of victims by age. But it turned out that the level of empathy for a puppy, an adult dog or a child was the same, while the adult got the last “place”. Only the adult dog received less empathy compared to the human infant.

"Subjects did not view dogs as animals, but rather as 'fur babies' or family members on a par with human babies," the researchers concluded, confirming that people often think of their pets as family.

Last month, a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, explained why we are so attached to our dogs. According to scientists, dogs make more facial movements when a person pays attention to them. Dogs raise their eyebrows and even open their eyes wider when they seek attention from a person.

The researchers concluded that this may be one of the “threads” of communication between the owner and the pet.

“The research tells us that their facial expressions respond to people, not just other dogs,” Bridget Waller, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Portsmouth and an author of the study, told The Guardian. “This tells us about how domestication shaped dogs, what changed in them to learn to be more social with humans.”

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