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Dogs are loved like children

02.05.2015

Many people love dogs so much that sometimes they even talk about them as children. To some, such a comparison will seem strange and reprehensible - how can you put an animal, even an exceptional smart, sweet and kind, and your child on the same board? However, at the level of brain biochemistry, this is true: emotional attachment, whether to dogs or children, is reinforced by the same hormonal response.

Takefumi Kikusui and his laboratory at Azabu University have been studying the hormone oxytocin, which is synthesized in the hypothalamus and transported throughout the body with blood, for quite some time. It is sometimes called the "hormone of love", although it would be more accurate to speak of it as the "hormone of social bonds." When we communicate harmoniously with another person, when our relationship is built on respect, emotional attachment, trust, altruism, this can be seen in the amount of oxytocin - apparently due to the fact that it interacts with neural networks that process social information and emotions.

The most famous example is the communication between mother and child: when they look at each other, both hormone levels rise. It is believed that positive feedback works here: the emotional "plus" is reinforced by oxytocin, which itself warms up emotions, forcing us to become even more attached to a person. It is also worth noting that the hormone has an equally strong effect on male psychology: it not only helps the father find a common emotional language with the child, but also stimulates the man’s attachment to his “half”. Similar effects of oxytocin on animal behavior have also been noted many times.

The researchers came up with the idea that our "interspecies" relationships with pets are reinforced by the same neurochemical mechanisms. The experiment involved several dozen volunteers who kept dogs or wolves. Urine was taken from the owners and their pets for analysis, and then they were taken to a room where a person and an animal could communicate with each other for half an hour, which, in addition to games, also meant a face-to-face conversation. (Wolves, however, avoid direct eye contact, even with those they know from a very young age.) The oxytocin test was repeated after the session.

It turned out that 30-minute contact with a pet raised the level of the hormone in both humans and animals: in dogs it increased by 130%, in humans (regardless of gender) by 300%. Moreover, the "oxytocin explosion" very much depended on the duration of mutual eye-to-eye gaze: the longer a person and a dog looked into each other's eyes, the more hormone they had. If they looked at each other a little, then the level of oxytocin hardly changed - just like the owners of wolves.

The opposite experiment was also made: before the game session, the dogs received a portion of oxytocin spray through the nose (the wolves no longer participated in this, since no one could tell how they would react if something was sprayed into their noses). In an article in Science, the authors write that “girl” dogs after hormonal doping looked at their owner more often and longer - in general, the duration of eye contact increased by 150%. But the "boy" dogs did not react in any way to the oxytocin spray. Perhaps this gender difference is due to the fact that oxytocin generally plays a big role in females - after all, it is also needed during childbirth and during milk production.

It turns out that in some sense we really perceive a pet as a "little brother" - at least if we start from the neurochemistry of emotions. There is, however, the question of how things are with other animals, such as cats or parrots. Of course, those with whom they live will say that they also treat their pets as "little brothers", but how things are with oxytocin can only be said after additional experiments.

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