From BBC news
Do Dogs Love?
Ask
agility trainers if their dogs feel the emotion of love, and you
will get a puzzled look. "Of course dogs love," they would
quickly reply. Science, however, is slower to respond and looks for
tangible evidence of emotion before admitting its existence.
A
new study is beginning to prove with scientific evidence that dogs
do indeed love. Over the past two years, Emory University
Neuroscientist Gregory Burns has been looking at MRI images of dogs'
brains in a study to find out what dogs think of humans. He released
a few of his findings in an op-ed piece for the "New York
Times" on Oct. 5, 2013.
What the MRI Reveals
Burns and
his colleagues have scanned the brains of a dozen dogs trained to go
into a MRI machine. He used different stimuli to see how the dogs'
brains would react. His findings show that the area of the brain
called the caudate nucleus lights up when the dogs' humans returned
to view after a brief separation. This is the same area of the brain
that is activated when humans feel love.
In
his article, Burns says, "The ability to experience positive
emotions, like love and attachment, would mean that dogs have a level
of sentience comparable to that of a human child. And this ability
suggests a rethinking of how we treat dogs."
This
type of MRI experiment has never been done before because it was
believed dogs had to be anesthetized before going into an enclosed
and noisy MRI machine. This made the study of how a dog's brain
lights up when presented with different stimuli impossible. Burns
looked for a solution and trained 12 dogs to willingly put their
heads in an MRI machine for brief periods, so their brains could be
studied while the dogs were awake.
Through
MRI studies, we will learn more about how similar we are to our
canine counterparts. Much of this is no shock to the agility
community. We have known how much our dogs love us for decades upon
decades. What may be a shock is how this type of information changes
dog training.
