Does Your Dog Really Love You?

Or is canine devotion a scam?

When you get home from school, your dog bounds up to you, jumps up, licks you, and wags its tail feverishly. Other friends may come and go, but your dog truly loves you--right?

Wrong, according to recent research in the field of animal behavior.

Dogs are con artists, says Stephen Budiansky, author of If a Lion Could Talk, a book about how animals interact with people. Dogs are experts at manipulating human emotions. They "pick our pockets clean," he says, "and leave us smiling about it."

For example, when you yell at your dog for soiling the carpet and he cringes, you are probably calmed by his obvious regret. That regret may be obvious, but is it sincere? No, Budiansky says.

"The cringe is a successful technique for deflecting aggression," Budiansky writes in a recent Atlantic Monthly magazine article. Dogs inherited a sharp sensitivity to social cues from their wolf ancestors, he says, and have fine-tuned their behavior with people over thousands of years.

Human beings also interpret other programmed behaviors, such as protectiveness, and "read into them extravagant tales of love and fidelity," Budiansky says. However, when a dog barks at an intruder or other perceived danger, what's really happening is that the dog is feeling protected by us (we're his pack leaders, after all), and feels emboldened to react to the threat.

IT'S A DOG'S LIFE

Dogs, like people, are social animals. In dog society, there is a strong social hierarchy where lower-ranking animals must submit to and please dominant animals in order to survive. Figuring out how to do that--including reading body language and tone of voice--is basic canine instinct. "That's what dogs do for a living," says Gregory Acland, a Cornell University canine expert.

Their behavior has paid off. There are 50 million dogs in this country alone, costing their owners $5 billion a year in dog food and $7 billion a year in veterinary care.

"Dogs take from the rich, they take from the poor, and they keep it all," Budiansky writes.

Dogs couldn't pull off this monstrous trick without a lot of help from their victims. Human beings misunderstand animal behavior because we invest other animals with our own emotions. "Biologists, if they weren't victims of the same blindness that afflicts us all," he writes, "wouldn't hesitate to classify dogs as social parasites."