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By Root 679 0

choose to bond with. Dogs are diurnal, ready to be awake when we can take them out and asleep when we can't. Notably, the nocturnal aardvark and badger are rare as pets. Dogs are a good size, with enough variation between breeds to suit different specs: small enough to pick up, big enough to take seriously as an individual. Their body is familiar, with parts that match ours—eyes, belly, legs—and an easy mapping on most of those that don't—their forelimbs to our arms; their mouth or nose to our hands.* (The tail is a disparity, but it is pleasing in its own right.) They move more or less the way we do (if more swiftly): they go forward better than backward; they have a relaxation to their stride and a grace to their run. They are manageable: we can leave them by themselves for long stretches of time; their feeding is not complicated; they are trainable. They try to read us, and they are readable (even if we often misread). They are resilient and they are reliable. And their lifetime is in scale with ours: they will oversee a long arc of our lives, perhaps from childhood to young adulthood. A pet rat might live a year—too brief; the gray parrot sixty—too long; dogs hit a middle ground.

Finally, they are compellingly cute. And by compelling, I mean a literal compulsion: it is part of our constitution that we coo over puppies, that we soften at the sight of a big-headed, small-limbed mutt, that we go ga-ga for a pug nose and a furry tail. It has been suggested that humans are adapted to be attracted to creatures with exaggerated features—the prime examples of which are human infants. Infants come with comically distorted versions of adult parts: enormous heads; pudgy, foreshortened limbs; teeny fingers and toes. We presumably evolved to feel an instinctual interest in, and drive to help, infants: without an older human's assistance, no infant would survive on its own. They are adorably helpless. Thus those non-human animals with neotenized (infantlike) features may prompt our attention and care because these are features of human juveniles. Dogs accidentally fit the bill. Their cuteness is half fur and half neoteny, which they have in spades: heads overly large for their bodies; ears all out of proportion with the size of the heads they are attached to; full, saucer eyes; noses undersized or oversized, never nose-sized.

All these features are relevant in attracting us to dogs, but they don't fully explain why we bond. The bond is formed over time—not just on looks, but on how we interact together. At its most general, the explanation may simply be that, as one of Woody Allen's characters says, we need the eggs. He describes his own crazy pair-bonding attempts with a joke about his brother, a fellow so off that he thinks he's a chicken. Sure, the family could send him to be fixed of this delusion, but they're too happy with the protein-rich spoils of his mental disease. In other words, the answer is a non-answer: it's simply in our nature to bond.* Dogs, who evolved among us, are the same way.

At a more scientific level, the question of how bonding came to be in the nature of dogs and humans is answerable in two ways: with explanations that in ethology are called "proximate" and "ultimate." An ultimate explanation is an evolutionary one: why a behavior like bonding to others evolved to begin with. The best answer here is that both we and dogs (and dogs' forebears) are social animals, and we are social because it turned out to confer an advantage. For instance, one popular theory is that human sociality allowed for the distribution of roles that enabled them to hunt more effectively. Thus our ancestors' success at hunting made it possible for them to survive and thrive, while those poor Neanderthals who stuck it out on their own did not. For wolves, too, staying in social family groups allows for cooperative hunting of large game, for the convenience of a mating partner, and for assistance in rearing the pups.

We might be social with any other social animal; but we do not, notably, bond with meerkats, ants, or beavers.