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By Root 663 0

dogs is strengthened by contact, by synchrony, and by marking reunions with a greeting ceremony. So too are we strengthened by the bond. Simply petting a dog can reduce an overactive sympathetic nervous system within minutes: a racing heart, high blood pressure, the sweats. Levels of endorphins (hormones that make us feel good) and oxytocin and prolactin (those hormones involved in social attachment) go up when we're with dogs. Cortisol (stress hormone) levels go down. There is good reason to believe that living with a dog provides the social support which correlates with reduced risk for various diseases, from cardiovascular disease to diabetes to pneumonia, and better rates of recovery from those diseases we do get. In many cases, the dog receives nearly the same effect. Human company can lower a dog's cortisol level; petting can calm a racing heart. For both of us, this is a kind of placebo, which is not to say that it isn't real, but that a change is induced in us without a known agent of the change. Bonding with a pet can do the work that long-term use of prescribed drugs or cognitive behavioral therapy do. Of course, it can go wrong, too: separation anxiety is the consequence of a dog feeling so very attached that he cannot stand a moment of detachment.

What are the other results of the bond? We've seen how much they know about us—our smell, our health, our emotions—due not just to their sensory acuity but also to their simple familiarity with us. They come to know how we normally act, smell, and look over the course of our days, and then they are able to notice, many times in ways we cannot, when there is a deviation. The bond effect works because dogs are, at their best, acting as extremely good social interactants. They are responsive, and, crucially, they pay attention to us.

And this connection to us runs deep. A simple experiment consisting of dogs and yawning humans indicates that our link is instinctual—on the level of reflex. Dogs catch our yawns. Just as happens between humans, dog subjects who saw someone yawning themselves began uncontrollably yawning in the next few minutes. Chimpanzees are the only other species we know of for whom yawning is contagious. Spend a few minutes yawning at your own dog (trying not to glare, giggle, or give in to his inevitable complaints) and you can see for yourself this deep-seated connection between human and dog.

Yawning dogs aside, there is a limit to the science here. Science is quite intentionally not looking at the very feature that is most important to dog owners: the feel of the relationship between person and dog. That feel is made up of daily affirmations and gestures, coordinated activities, shared silence. It can be deconstructed somewhat with the dull butter knife of science, but it cannot be reproduced in an experimental setting: it is importantly non-experimental. Experimenters often use what is called a double-blind procedure to assure the validity of their data. The subject is always blind to the point of the experiment, and in a double-blind the experimenter is also blind to which subject's data—one from the experimental group or the control group—he is analyzing. In that way, one avoids inadvertently seeing a subject's behavior as fitting in just a little more tightly with the tested hypothesis.

Dog-human interactions, by contrast, are happily double-seeing. We have the feeling of knowing exactly what the dog is doing; the dog may, too. What we think we see is not the stuff of good science, but it is the stuff of a rewarding interaction.

The bond changes us. Most fundamentally, it nearly instantly makes us someone who can commune with animals—with this animal, this dog. A large component of our attachment to dogs is our enjoyment of being seen by them. They have impressions of us; they see us in their eyes, they smell us. They know about us, and are poignantly and indelibly attached to us. The philosopher Jacques Derrida ruminated on his cat seeing him nude: he was startled and embarrassed. To Derrida, what was startling was that the animal