Dr. Coren writes "We now have data that suggests that we have selectively bred the domestic dog so that it is strongly biased to love humans (or at least one human) more strongly than it loves other dogs." Yet, looked at closely, and in the specific context of how it was done, this study really shows that we tend to act as psychological buffers for our dogs.[2]

It should also be noted that some experts — like Dr. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas — say that dogs actually prefer the company of other dogs to the company of humans.[3] However, I think Dr. Coren is spot on in saying that, as a general rule, dogs do seem to be more interested in and in need of the company of humans than other dogs. After all he's attained his reputation as an expert on canine cognition by seeing and understanding things about dogs that others in the field often overlook.

But why do dogs tend to love us more than other dogs? What exactly do we give our dogs that they can't get from their canine pals?

Some would say dogs love us because we feed them, take care of them, and take them for walks, an idea that was actually built in to the study (the human caretaker was assigned the task of taking the dogs being tested on exercise walks, twice a day). So wouldn't a dog's love for us be more a matter of conditioning than selective breeding?

Certainly that may be part of it. Still, no matter how many times you fed a wolf and took him for walks (if he'd let you), you'd never see even 1/10th of the love and affection that you'd get from a dog.

Plus, I've often heard clients complain, "I walk the dog, I feed the dog, yet she loves my husband (or wife) more than me!" This suggests that while there may be some positive conditioning involved, there may also be something else behind a dog's love, something that really is related to the domestication process, as Dr. Coren suggests.

Personally, I always try to see things from the dog's perspective. And I think the reasons dogs love us so much may be a) that humans are the most behaviorally complex animal on the planet, and b) that dogs are genetically designed to pay close attention to the behavioral patterns of animals they either feel an attraction for, or those they'd rather avoid.

Dopamine: The Salience Detector
The latest research on dopamine shows that it is not just released when we eat ice cream, for example, or have a cocktail, but also when we inadvertently drink sour milk or stub our toes. The brain isn't rewarding us for drinking sour milk or stubbing our toes. It wants us to remember not to do those things if we can help it.

The mind runs into a briar patch when it comes to things that are both pleasurable and dangerous: things like nicotine, heroin, cocaine, and alcohol. They can be deadly in large amounts, and yet they create very strong addictions that are very difficult to recover from.

Dopamine is also released when we detect changing patterns in our environment, particularly patterns related to things that either provide some benefit or spell possible harm, or both. So dopamine wants us to pay attention to those features or the environment. It's a salience detector.

Approach/Avoidance or Attraction/Resistance
The study Dr. Coren cited refers to humans — as seen through the dog's eyes — as objects of emotional attachment, which is a neo-Freudian term.

The fact is, all animals tend to feel attracted to life-sustaining features of their environments and feel repelled by things they know are dangerous: good things they move toward, bad things they move away from.

A stand of tall grass or low-lying aspen branches would hold no interest for wolves. But an elk would be highly attracted to them. For elk the leaves and grass are objects of attraction. Wolves would feel more attracted to the elk than to the aspen trees (though they might form an association between an aspen grove and the possibility of finding elk feeding there). For the elk, the wolf is an object of repulsion, something to be avoided.

But oddly enough, unlike an elk's attraction for aspen leaves — which is quite simple — a wolf's attraction for the elk is double-edged. It's like a hit of cocaine in that the elk is both desirable and dangerous.

As far as dogs are concerned, human beings are like the elk are for the wolf (or like cocaine is for an addict); we stimulate strong feelings of both love and danger in our dogs.

Falling in Love Is a Dangerous Business
On a certain level, the original dog/human relationship may be similar to the way humans feel when we fall in love. Yes, we feel attracted to the objects of our affections. But we also feel anxious, if not downright trepidatious about the experience, because falling in love makes us completely vulnerable.

When our ancestors and the ancestors of our dogs first met up, there must have been both a mutual attraction (we were both attracted to large prey), and a mutual feeling of vulnerability, the perfect recipe for either falling in love with one another, or attempting to put the other's lights out. And since humans didn't start hating and killing wolves until we began putting roots down, both literally and figuratively, it's likely that our mutual attraction won out over our feelings of vulnerability. In other words, we fell in love.

Falling in love, human style, also involves pattern recognition. We're constantly thinking about the loved one's appearance, their eyes and hair, the sound of their voice, and we're keenly tuned into their behavioral patterns as well. We want to learn everything we can about them. We study every little thing about them.

If pattern recognition is rewarding, then hunting large prey as part of a group would automatically be more rewarding than hunting small prey, solo, because group predators, like wolves and humans, have to pay attention to more patterns in the environment:

1) the behavioral patterns of the prey,
2) the changing patterns in terrain, and
3) the behavioral patterns of one's fellow hunters.

So it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to think that two species of social predators, who also happened to share a habitat, might begin to study one another, check out each other's behavioral patterns, and thus, begin to form an emotional bond.

I'm not saying it's exactly like falling in love, just that there are similarities.