Face up to your dog’s feelings ...

September 23, 2006, Sarah Newman
Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, copyright 2006.

Of course your dog loves you. It's written all over his face. All over his body, too.

Well, maybe not all over. But the signs are there. And who's to say that what your dog is feeling when he runs to the door to greet you, his tail wagging wildly in welcome, isn't the canine equivalent of human love?

Certainly not Patricia B. McConnell, author of the new book "For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend" (Ballantine, 238 pages, $24.95). Indeed, were McConnell to pooh-pooh the popular notion that dogs provide unconditional love, she'd question the "unconditional" before she'd doubt the "love."

McConnell is not simply anthropomorphizing when she talks about what dogs feel. She carries credentials in her training-treat bag. The co-host of National Public Radio's "Calling All Pets," McConnell is an associate professor of zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a certified applied animal behaviorist whose company, Dog's Best Friend, specializes in treating aggressive behavior. She also is a dedicated scientist and researcher with a doctorate in ethology, the study of how genetics and environment influence animal behavior.

Above all, McConnell is an animal lover. Her latest book is as much a fascinating collection of real-dog stories, including warm-your-heart images of her own canine companions, as it is a deliciously easy-to-swallow science lesson on how much dogs and humans have in common.

Along with advances in neuroscience, interest in the minds of animals has risen rapidly in the past 10 years, McConnell noted in a phone interview from her home in Madison. One of the most important things to come out of the research is a growing acceptance that dogs not only have feelings, they also have rich emotional lives.

Dogs and humans share similar brain structures and chemistry, and many biologists have long believed that dogs feel the same basic primitive emotions, such as fear, anger and happiness, as people do, McConnell said. Moreover, dogs tend to express their emotions in much the same way as people. It's one of the reasons we love them so much, she contends.

"I was stunned by how similar the expressions of emotion on the face of a human and a dog can be," she said.

"It didn't hit me until I started working on the book how dogs' faces are more expressive than almost any other animal's," she continued. "I wouldn't say that dogs are more emotional than other animals. But they express their emotions so much more."

The reason, she believes, is that dogs are "highly social beings. There's no point in expressing emotion if no one is there to relate to. My favorite example of the opposite is the panda. Pandas are solitary animals, and they always look the same -- like toy stuffed bears," she said.

While some scientists still deny that animals have feelings and emotions, much of the controversy now is about consciousness, McConnell said. "Some scientists -- not me -- argue that animals have emotions, but that they're not conscious of them. I personally think that dogs are conscious of their emotions -- and of a lot of other things."

Social emotions are a cause for debate because they require animals to have a sense of self. Take jealousy, for example.

"My personal speculation, based on what I know of neurobiology and my experience as a behaviorist and dog owner, is that there's no question that dogs can be jealous," McConnell said. "I think jealousy is really simple. Somebody has something I don't have and I want it."

Guilt is more complicated "because it implies an understanding of some moral code," she continued. "The head-down, guilty look that our dogs give us when we come home and find that they had an accident on the carpet may seem like guilt to us, but it's appeasement -- like waving a white flag. That's not the same as guilt.

"I think we have to be very careful about assigning moral attributes to certain behaviors. Saying 'He knows better' is not a useful concept," she said.

Love is a different story. "Although the love we have for our dogs is often trivialized, there's nothing trivial about it," McConnell writes. The depth of love that people feel for their animal companions was demonstrated dramatically in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when people risked their lives to stay with their animals rather than leave them behind.

For their part, dogs "seem to be as attracted to us as we are to them," McConnell believes. Biologically speaking, you can blame brain chemicals. Or the dog's evolutionary programming to be part of a pack.

Perhaps dogs are simply the social parasites that psychologist John Archer argues that they are. However, McConnell believes that "it's shortsighted -- sad, really -- to dismiss the love that dogs have for us in such mechanistic terms."

As she sees it: "There's no question but that most of our dogs love us, and there's little doubt that, sometimes, their love is often almost epic in its intensity."

But unconditional? She points to her book's chapter on anger as evidence that "the chance that our dogs are never irritated with us is slim at best."

Just as dogs can love, they also can grieve the loss of those they love, McConnell says.

"There is still a lot of research needed in that area. But there are so many credible anecdotes of animals who appear, biologically and physically, to be acting as we do when grieving, that the evidence seems to be overwhelming," McConnell said.

"Dogs form exceptionally strong social relationships. Those relationships are formed by the same brain structures and physiology as ours are. So it makes all the sense in the world that dogs can grieve," she said.

It also makes sense to learn all that we can about what dogs feel and how their feelings compare with ours, "because it's important for our species to understand where we fit in with the rest of life," McConnell says. "So much suffering -- in both species -- could be prevented if we had a better understanding of the emotional lives of our dogs."