War Dogs by Rebecca Frankel Page B

projected images of human faces—some were smiling or frowning, while others showed no expression. Mills then used eye-tracking technology to determine what the dog’s eyes would look at, if they looked at human expression at all. It turns out, as Mills discovered, that dogs also gaze left. 13 They were seeking out the right side of the human face—the “emotional” side. His findings provide strong evidence to support the idea that dogs read human expression—that they knowingly look and then decipher information from our faces.
    But though these experiments show that dogs are uniquely in tune with humans and human emotions, they do not “prove” the existence of love. And for the most part, the study of the beneficial effects of the emotional exchange between man and dog have largely been one-sided. There have been quite a few scientific studies on what dogs do for humans—we know their company lowers our blood pressure 14 and greatly reduces the stress we feel 15 —but the study of the positive effect of humans on dogs is scarce.
    One study that did examine the effect of the canine-human bond on both dogs and humans centered on oxytocin. A neuropeptide produced in the hypothalamus 16 linked to feelings of trust and bonding, especially between a breast-feeding mother and her newborn child, oxytocin is best known as the mammalian hormone of love. In 2010, researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden presented a study that looked at levels of oxytocin when dogs and humans were together. 17 What the study found is that after a “petting session” with their dog, owners experienced a boost in their levels of oxytocin. Perhaps even more interesting than the appearance of oxytocin in blood samples of the human subjects was that a similar spike in the hormone was also seen in the blood samples taken from the dogs—a finding that points to the fact that the bonding emotions really do go both ways.
    Still, even Bekoff readily concedes that there is a lack of focus on proving the bond, and so the evidence is still largely anecdotal. But then, he wonders, why do we really need these studies? It’s almost comical, Bekoff muses, to have to conduct scientific experiments for the things we assume would already have a strong empirical basis, like a dog’s ability to love. The reason the studies don’t exist, he believes, is because we don’t really need them. The idea is backed by something far simpler—common sense. 18
    To believe that animals are without the capacity for the more complex secondary emotions—such as longing, jealousy, or shame—is an idea to which Bekoff takes tremendous offense. In his mind it’s an arrogant and dismissive assumption by humans. Actually, the qualifying word he uses is “insane,” and while we’re on the phone together, his voice rises to very high decibels at the preposterousness of such limited thinking.
    He poses it this way: “If you define love as an enduring and a strong bond—I love you, I miss you, I seek you out, I prefer you”—why, he asks, can’t this be transferred to the dog? In other words, of course dogs love us.
    Cold is slowly seeping from the Colorado ground through my many wintry layers into the backs of my legs. The frost of early morning is all but melted now, and when the wind relents, the sun is strong and warm against my back, a wall of heat that I lean into. My instinct is to keep my body loose and my movement soft and even, to project the very essence of calm. I’m attempting to engage in a courtship and the object of my attention hasn’t quite made up her mind about me. But I am hopeful because the eyes that watch me carefully now are friendlier than they’d been the previous afternoon.
    I had followed Jakubin into the back of the Air Force Academy kennels where each dog has his own separate quarters, a space of six feet by six feet, walled on all