They had to do all these studies? To know what us pet owners have known all our lives. I was raised about dogs, have always had a dog to love my entire life. I'm now 58, and have a new puppy. when I get in my late 60s, I will have a dog that my daughter will take if I need her to. I sleep with my doggies on the bed, we look like a pile of puppies. Sometimes my cat joins in too. but she's much more dignified than we are.

It’s not widely known but of all animals the phenotype of the domestic dog is the closest to that of the human. Evolutionary science has been sidetracked by the false hypothesis that the basic genome is what differentiates species. While it is a factor it is far from being the main one. Science talkers, as opposed to the few who are really scientists, always skate around things they cannot explain and the huge difference between humans and chimps despite a difference in genome of only a few percent has been one of them. Psychologists a year or two ago began to realize that orangutans where much closer in behavior to humans than Chimps despite being more remote from a genome standpoint. The mistake was made in assuming we understood most everything about genetics once there were claims the genome had been “decoded”. This was a bit like looking through the keyhole of the locked Smithsonian then claiming an intimate knowledge of all the sciences it contains. Another skate-around subject was why if the Grey Wolf and the domestic dog are the same species and can interbreed, their behavior is so radically different and the differences are firmly heritable. The answer is that the genome does not make the animal it only provides a foundation for making the animal. Today real scientists in genetics are working in an area they describe as epigenomics in which genes are influenced by programming and this programming is malleable and adapts over time for the species to better fit its environment. The evidence is in the phenotype, which encompasses the genome and everything else that describes the animal. In some cultures dogs have lived with us for so long that our phenotypes have converged, the genomes have remained essentially constant but the programming has changed. And it’s not uniform for people of different ethnic origins. Many anthropologists believe that humans might not have survived the last ice age except for the role the domestic dog played in hunting. This is particularly true for northern Europe. It’s no coincidence that many hunting dogs such as deer hounds and retrievers were developed in Northern Europe where out phenotypes had become more codependent. So the puppy love thing is natural and to be expected. Overt sadness abounds in a free lone dog with no owner; new little pups a few weeks old will pick out their future owner given a chance. What they are recognizing and are instinctively looking for is a potential phenotype fit. What’s been late coming is the recognition this is a two way street and without a dog there is a hole waiting to be filled and when it is the outcome may be astonishing. In pre-historic hard times a loss of a dog could presage a dent in hunting ability and starvation. We are not apart and above nature, we are part of it. Psychology research labs employing Chimps are being closed, replaced by dog labs, for dogs are far better subjects for early development research because like the Orangutan their culture evidenced by their phenotype is closer to ours. Interestingly psychopaths are immediately recognized as such by a dog because the connection they make with us is through empathy and that is what is missing in a psychopath or sociopath.