Wednesday Wag: Your dog loves you, and there’s science to back it up

It’s an age-old question: Does your dog love you as much as food? Well, a new neurological study proves that, yes, our dogs do love us.

Look, anyone with a dog knows our dogs love us. They’re loyal, caring, and affectionate. But now we’ve got scientific proof to back up what has always been obvious to us.

After his dog died, Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns decided to find out just what our dogs are thinking and feeling. The best way to do that? Stick them in a magnetic resonance imaging machine and see what’s going on inside their brains. Berns spent months getting 90 dogs used to big, loud MRI machines. He then did brain scans on the dogs to find out what was really going on in there.

He then gave the dogs hot dogs and praise at different times to see how the dogs would respond to each reward and what would happen neurologically.

This, of course, is the real test of love. My dog, like so many others, is completely obsessed with food. She’ll eat almost anything. And she goes completely nuts for treats. I’ve never doubted that my dog loves me, but I’ve always wondered if she loved food just a little bit more.

But she doesn’t! It turns out, most dogs responded to the food and praise equally, while about 20 percent responded to the praise more. So our dogs love us just as much, if not more, than food. And they’re not just cozying up to you to get those treats. The scans also showed that dogs are wired to recognize faces.

In an interview with The New York Times, Berns noted that these findings that animals do have emotions could inform the way we help aggressive shelter dogs and avoid euthanizing them, how we treat farm animals, and more.

Additionally, Berns learned that dogs and humans have very similar prefrontal lobe activity. So yes, dogs use their brains not so differently from humans, and they also have pathways for telling faces apart.

Next: Wednesday Wag: Smarty Paws lets the leash do the talking

But most importantly, this study proves that, yes, our dogs do love us … Even as much as they love food.