Dogs are domesticated wolves. Wolves are pack animals. Wolves are not loyal to their pack out of any rational cost-benefit analysis, but by primal instinct and emotion. Dogs have been bred and trained, for thousands of years, to think of their human masters as members of their own pack, and as their pack leaders. Therefore, if love is an emotion of which non-human mammals are capable – and I see no reason to believe it isn’t – your dog loves you, just as a wolf loves the other wolves of its pack.
Whether your cat loves you is a more complicated question.
The dog next door to me seems to love everyone, except the mailman.
He greets a total stranger with as much affection and “love” as he does the owners. He’s such a sweetheart unless you’re in a mailman’s uniform, then he wants to rip your face off.
See no reason dogs don’t feel love, to a greater or lesser extent. Yes, it possibly could be greater. Just because human brains are better at abstract reasoning and language, doesn’t mean we’re also the best at everything else a brain can do. Its entirely reasonable that the love a dog feels would stagger a human with its intensity.
Of course, it could also be wagging its tail-thing so the tall pack leader will give it more food, because that seemed to work in the past.
For my money, I’m guessing that dogs are entirely capable of feeling pretty much the full breadth of emotions humans enjoy. Humans like to think they are special, and they are, no doubt, but not that special. Strip us of our culture, our knowledge, our language, and we’re still pretty much just mammals, and aside from our reasoning and language skills, our brains probably work on the same level as a lot of other mammals. Superior in some respects, inferior in others, but mostly the same.
Do you mean I’m wrong in that I think dogs (and cats) do feel “love”, or that I’m wrong in that we have to define love before we answer the question?
In the first case, I am in agreement with you, and in the second, you’re saying that they do demonstrate love, without actually defining what that means.
The second. Love is relative, I think. I my love my car, but that’s not a real love. Just like I love my LCD TV, but I LOVE my kids. I think the dogs defined real love by their actions, I don’t think they would almost piddle themselves out of joy for that lenght of time over a lost bone as they did for their returning humans.
Sorry if this makes not a lot of sense., I’m having one of THOSE weeks, so if I’m not making myself clear, please just pat me on the head and smile knowingly.
Yeah, I think we’re agreeing. My point is that humans exhibit certain behaviors with each other, and I’m willing to label the reason for those behaviors as “love”. Dogs exhibit the same sorts of behaviors, so logically, I conclude that dogs love, too.
I don’t know about your dog and her relationship with you, I’ve never met either of you.
But I firmly believe that animals have feelings every bit as “real” as ours. They don’t have the same sort of emotional capabilities of a normal adult human, but then again neither do small children and we don’t argue about whetherthey have feelings. Dogs and cats have about the same emotional and analytical capabilities as your average toddler/pre-schooler, and they express love in very similar ways.
When my niece was smaller, she got excited and jumped and ran and shouted when I came over. She wanted me to touch her and talk to her and generally pay attention to her, and when I wasn’t doing that she wanted to sit on or near me. Basically, she acted just like my dogs do when I come home.
I can’t believe people are saying that human love is thought out. Maybe after the fact, as a justification, but no one ever rationally decided to fall in love with someone else.
Perhaps dog love is like the love you have for your newborn baby. It is just there, conditioned into you by evolution.
It is not just food. Our old dog follows my wife around all day, though he has arthritis and has trouble getting up. If she is gone he’ll wait at the door. It takes him a day or two to stop waiting for her when I’m alone with him. Our Golden loves everybody, but we have a neighbor who she loves more than anyone. Our neighbor has never, ever fed her or anything. That’s close enough to love for me.
As mentioned till you can come up with a rock solid, empirical definition of “love” that is testable I am not sure we can ever know for certain.
That said anyone who has a dog knows they display a myriad of emotions that are easily understandable to us. Anger, fear, happiness, sadness…dogs practically shout these emotions at us and even someone who has never been around a dog will probably correctly read the dog’s emotion.
So why should we suppose love is unique and not included? Certainly dogs display behavior that is right in line with “love” as we usually describe it. Watch the video of the dogs reuniting with their human when the human returns from being away a long time. The dog is not running out like that because it expects a treat. It is far beyond happy greetings of just any person. The dogs are besides themselves with joy. Pure, unadulterated exuberance. They remembered the person, missed the person and are overjoyed at their return.
I cannot even imagine, if we suppose dogs are just automatons with programmed behaviors that benefit them, why they would go so nutso in the case of the returning owner.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck I’ll go with duck till better evidence presents itself. Occam’s razor would call for this assessment too I think.
I don’t think anyone is. What is being said is that we can reason about our emotions. Can’t do much about them, but we can be aware of emotions in an intelectual sense. We can give names to them, and can empathise about emotions we hear about through nothing more than written language. So thinking about our emotions is a big part of being human, and probably what sets us apart. But the raw emotions alone, no.
We can also reason enough about our emotions that we can, given enough investment in effort, provide some small control and direction. But it isn’t exactly easy. Mostly it is about reasoning about cause, and trying to control causation. So even then it is a second order effect. No direct control, but through self awareness we have some. What ability even the most inteligent other animals have is probably hard to know.
Our intellectual analysis of our emotions (and our usually feeble attempts at controlling them) happen after we have them. If dogs can’t analyze their love like we can, that doesn’t mean they don’t have it. The question, after all, if if dogs love, not if dogs write love poetry.
But how do you ever know you’re not just projecting? A puggle’s wrinkled face looks worried but it’s not.
And if a dog knows it did wrong in tearing up the garbage, enough to look “ashamed”, why does it do it anyway? Love might mean thinking about the consequences of one’s actions and not doing something that will hurt another. A dog isn’t capable of that.
You talking about all humans? The emotional ability of people has a sliding scale, from sensitive people who love easily and completely to human bricks. Each dog is different to. That is why when you ask about a purebred, the kennel can tell you what kind of attachment you can expect , how they will be with kids or how much they protect the home.
We came home from a folk fest. We stopped on the porch. My mom and I heard BAWLING at the window. It was basicly " MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY!" We stepped in and Scout (sorry no pics)
almost literally jumped into my arms. She’s the personfication of unconditional love.
I also remember returning from college one year. I was in bed and Spin had joined me, all happy and purring
My sister came in for a second. Spin saw her and started MROWING, like she was telling her that her person was home.
Gotta say cats do have the capabilty for unconditional love.
But it isn’t unconditional love in the sense of a human. Unconditional love means no matter what you do to me, I’ll love you; I may not always like you but I love you (want good for you). Do you really think the pet would leap into your arms if you systematically abused it? It leaps into your arms because it’s always had a positive experience in being around you.
My gut feeling is that emotions are pretty similar across most mammals…mankind doesn’t have the lock on everything.
Christian the Lion…you can’t tell me there isn’t SOMETHING there…the lion was truely glad to see them and was fond of them. He wasn’t doing it for food or reward…he was happy to see them. That is love or as close to it as you can get.
