'The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs," Charles de Gaulle once opined. And now science suggests he might have had good reason – according to research in Japan, the simple act of gazing into man's best friend's eyes, and it into yours, is actually creating a physiological, emotional bond that is good for you. And for your pet.
Science reports that in experiments conducted with a team of 30 owners and their dogs – breeds included golden retrievers, standard poodles, miniature Dachshunds, miniature Schnauzers, a Jack Russell Terrier, and two mongrels – prolonged mutual cross-species eye-gazing or touching produced elevated levels of Oxytocin, a hormone produced in the brain associated with nurturing and attachment. Oxytocin is involved in emotional bonding, childbirth, breast-feeding, sexual arousal and other functions, and the hormone has been shown to spike in mothers' brains when they look into their children's eyes.
The importance of the gaze in human bonding has been well understood but the evidence that its effects cross the species barrier and produce a continuous loop of loving reinforcement between humans and dogs is remarkable testimony to what many dog owners have always known.
The evolution of the ability to bond with humans appears to have come out of the domestication of wolves over generations, as they adapted to living near and scrounging off human communities. The ability to develop relationships – staring into human eyes is just one manifestation – advantaged some who passed on the knack. Or, as Science puts it, "dogs were domesticated by co-opting social cognitive systems in humans that are involved in social attachment".
Experiments involving wolves produced no such effects. Unlike dogs, wolves "tend to use eye contact as a threat" and are inclined to "avoid human eye contact," wrote Miho Nagasawa, a study author and research fellow at Jichi Medical University. And, as de Gaulle might have observed, gazing into a man's eyes may often also not produce the same result.