Dog behaviourist: Why your dog actually loves you (yes, really)

ASK ANYONE WHO has ever owned a dog whether they love them, and the answer will come back instantly.

Ask them whether the dog loves them back, and you’ll usually get the same answer, delivered with equal certainty.

For a long time, scientists were pretty sceptical about that second part. But over the past 20 years or so, research has caught up with what dog owners have always believed.

Your dog is basically wired to bond with you

Psychologists use something called attachment theory to describe the deep emotional bonds that form between children and their caregivers.

These bonds have four key features: wanting to be close to that person, turning to them when you’re scared, feeling safe enough to explore the world because they’re there, and getting upset when they’re gone. Dogs tick every single one of those boxes when it comes to their owners (Payne, 2016).

What makes that remarkable is that this isn’t something dogs just learned to do; it seems to be instinctual. Unlike wolves (their closest wild relatives), dogs are specifically oriented toward humans as a source of comfort and safety. They didn’t just adapt to living alongside us. They adapted to bonding with us.

A 2025 study involving 717 dog owners found that dogs scored remarkably highly for companionship and emotional support, often exceeding the ratings given to many human relationships (Turcsán, 2025).

This research suggested that the human-dog bond is unlike any other relationship people experience. It combines the nurturing, protective feelings typically associated with caring for a child with the companionship, trust and enjoyment normally found in a close friendship.

In many ways, dogs seem to occupy a unique role in people’s lives, acting as both family member and best friend. Further studies also found that children form stronger bonds with dogs than with any other kind of pet and that those bonds are genuinely good for their emotional wellbeing (Muldoon, 2019).

Children describe their dogs in almost exactly the same terms they’d use for their closest human friends: loyal, comforting, always there.

What’s happening in your brain (and theirs)

Brain imaging studies have shown that when dogs look at their owners’ faces, areas of the brain associated with reward, positive emotions and social attachment become active (Karl, 2020).

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Importantly, dogs’ brains respond differently to their owners than they do to strangers. This pattern closely resembles what researchers see in human infants, whose brains show a stronger response to their primary caregiver than to unfamiliar people.

These findings suggest that the bond dogs form with their owners is supported by many of the same neurological systems involved in human attachment and social relationships.

It goes both ways as well. Research tracking heart rate and movement in dog-owner pairs found that during positive interactions, dogs and their owners physically synchronise their bodies and start to mirror each other in a way that’s considered a genuine marker of emotional connection (Koskela, 2024).

And then there’s oxytocin, the hormone most associated with bonding and trust. When you look into your dog’s eyes, oxytocin levels rise in you and in the dog.

That mutual gaze creates a loop of bonding chemistry that mirrors what happens between mothers and infants. No other non-human species has been found to trigger this in humans. Just dogs.

Does having a dog actually make you happier?

It’s complicated. The popular version goes: dog = happiness. The research version is a bit more nuanced. Studies do show that strong dog bonds are associated with more positive emotions, less loneliness, a greater sense of purpose and better quality of life overall (Ellis, 2024; Sung, 2023).

If you’re going through a lonely period, a strong bond with your dog can genuinely buffer some of that. People with dogs who feel lonely tend to be doing emotionally better than people without dogs who feel lonely (Allen, 2022).

But there’s a catch. Very strong attachment to a dog can also be associated with higher rates of anxiety, particularly in people who are relying on the dog relationship more than supplementing with it (Lass-Hennemann, 2022; Northrope, 2024).

One study of over 1,000 dog owners found that the people with the strongest bonds also reported more worry: about their dog’s health, about the cost of vet bills, about what happens when they lose them (Merkouri, 2022).

What the research does say fairly clearly is that it’s the quality of the bond that matters most. Owners who genuinely pay attention to their dog’s emotional state and engage with them with care and empathy tend to do better themselves, and so do their dogs (Sung, 2023).

Grief over the loss of a beloved dog

Any honest look at the human-dog bond has to include the part that hurts most. Dogs don’t live as long as we do. Most of us will lose them. And because the bond is as deep as it is, the grief is often correspondingly intense.

Research has shown that the grief experienced after losing a dog can be as intense as the grief felt following the loss of a human loved one (Merkouri, 2022). For many people, however, this grief is not always recognised or supported in the same way as human bereavement.

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As a result, people can find themselves mourning deeply while also feeling self-conscious about the strength of their emotions. Yet this reaction is entirely understandable. Dogs often become important attachment figures in our lives, providing companionship, comfort, routine and emotional security.

When that bond is broken, the sense of loss can be profound. You have lost a being who played a significant role in your daily life, and it is natural for that grief to feel overwhelming.

What dogs get out of it

The research is harder here because dogs can’t exactly fill in questionnaires. But what we can measure points fairly clearly in one direction.

Dogs show elevated oxytocin with their owners. Their brains light up with attachment and reward activity when they see your face. They regulate physiologically alongside you. They seek you out, get anxious when you’re gone, and consistently choose you over strangers, even strangers holding food.

Whether what dogs experience is “love” in the way humans experience it is something science can’t fully answer yet. Subjective experience is notoriously hard to measure.

But the biological and behavioural signatures of attachment are there, and they’re specific to you in a way that goes well beyond just associating you with dinner.

The bottom line

Dogs have been living alongside humans for somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 years. In that time, they’ve developed something no other species has managed: a genuine orientation toward human emotion, human faces and human social life.

And they appear to form bonds with us that share the same biological architecture as the bonds we form with each other.

It’s not a simple relationship. But for most people, most of the time, what a dog offers is something genuinely hard to find: a relationship that is consistent, emotionally responsive, and non-judgmental in a way that even the best human relationships can struggle to sustain.

Suzi Walsh is an expert dog behaviourist and dog trainer. She has an honours degree in Zoology and a Masters in Applied Animal Welfare and Behaviour from the Royal Dick School of Veterinary. She has worked as a behaviourist on both TV, radio and has also worked training dogs in the film industry.

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