New York magazine has a long piece for your Sunday afternoon on why we love dogs, and what it might mean when we don't.
Some excerpts:
A child raised with a pet is more empathetic than one who isn’t. The dog—no secret here—is an excellent wingman. A 2008 study found that a man with a dog had a much better chance of getting a woman’s phone number than one without. And the dog can even tell you whether or not you’re a good person. A 1999 study found that people who strongly dislike dogs score significantly higher on the measure of anal character and lower on the empathy scale of the California Psychological Inventory, indicating “that people who liked dogs have less difficulty relating to people.”
As the relationship developed, specific canine qualities—the dog’s gaze, its unending adolescence, its uncanny responsiveness to human cues—evolved, a process that Serpell calls “anthropomorphic selection.” What was created was not, precisely, a human child, but it certainly was able to push some of the same buttons. According to one study, 84 percent of dog owners consider their animals akin to children—not a surprise, given all the baby talk. The British evolutionary psychologist John Archer has written, in critiquing Serpell’s work, that the dog’s ability to suck up human caregiving that could be going to human children while providing no evolutionary advantage makes them a social parasite. But possibly the stress-reduction effects, more than theoretical camp-guarding and hunting benefits, may have earned the dog’s keep. And anyway, are you calling my dog a parasite?
As the relationship developed, specific canine qualities—the dog’s gaze, its unending adolescence, its uncanny responsiveness to human cues—evolved, a process that Serpell calls “anthropomorphic selection.” What was created was not, precisely, a human child, but it certainly was able to push some of the same buttons. According to one study, 84 percent of dog owners consider their animals akin to children—not a surprise, given all the baby talk. The British evolutionary psychologist John Archer has written, in critiquing Serpell’s work, that the dog’s ability to suck up human caregiving that could be going to human children while providing no evolutionary advantage makes them a social parasite. But possibly the stress-reduction effects, more than theoretical camp-guarding and hunting benefits, may have earned the dog’s keep. And anyway, are you calling my dog a parasite?
Working-dog people tend to describe their own dogs in terms of sometimes heroic anecdotes, supernatural feats of tracking, an intuitive comprehension of human aims. I talked to a sheep farmer at the farmer’s market who described an incident where one of her Border Collies listened to a conversation she was having with one of her employees on a walkie-talkie, discerned instantly where the flock had escaped, and ran half a mile to cut them off.
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