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Dog Kitten Birds
A great deal of research by scientists to see if dogs and cats can really love us
Do our animals love us?
The scientific community cannot agree on whether animals can really have feelings for humans. According to research carried out in Japan and the United Kingdom, dogs and cats, like humans, excrete oxytocin, which is called the hormone of love and trust, writes the French daily Le Monde.
Anthropomorphism, the tendency to attribute human traits to animals, has never flourished as it has since social networks have emerged. Photos and videos of cats, dogs, but also lizards, pigeons or even insects make us feel that animals love, think and live like us. The Facebook page named Buzzfeed Animals has four million followers.
A study published on the pages of the American scientific journal PLoS One sparked this debate. She showed that the macaw parrots held in captivity turn red when in contact with their babysitter. The temptation to imagine that birds are in love with their breeder is great.
"But we can't go that far," said Aline Bertin, an expert on bird behavior at the National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA), which conducted the research. However, the fact that the parrot tries to attract the breeder's attention by hanging on to the cage and pulling the babysitter by the clothes suggests that she has positive emotions for her. Another study, published in the Royal Society of Open Science, showed that goats prefer to listen to those who are smiling and run from frowns.
However, scientists limit themselves to talking about emotions that can be measured physiologically and that last only a moment than emotions. "It's easy to prove that an animal is scared or stressed, but it's still difficult to scientifically prove that a large number of species can be happy," warns Aline Bertin.
The case of Hachiko
The case of the Hachiko dog from the 1920s in Japan is well known. The dog was waiting for his master, a university professor, at Shibuya station at the same time every night. In May 1925, the scientist died at work. The dog then waited for his master every day for ten years.
What was going on in his head? If scientists were able to measure oxytocin levels in the interwar period, they might be able to prove that the dog had extraordinary feelings for his master.
In 2015 and 2016, Japanese and British scientists showed that dogs and cats secrete oxytocin, a hormone of love and trust, just like humans. When a dog is praised and loved by its owner, the dog's oxytocin level can rise by up to 57 percent. For beasts it is only 12 percent. This confirms all the opinions that cats do not care too much about humans.
Motherly love
The excretion of oxytocin is reciprocal and viewed through insight: scientists have shown that a person's hormone levels have risen after playing with his four-legged friend.
Scientist Véronique Servais criticizes the paradox in our understanding of animals. In the 1960s, primatologist Harry Harlow studied maternal love in macaques rhesus. He showed that small macaques who lost their mother were affected by serious pathological behavioral changes. "These studies were conducted to tell about motherly love in humans!" wonders Véronique Servais. "Do you see the paradox? We observe monkeys to draw conclusions about the infant's love for the mother, but we refuse to talk about love in monkeys," he adds.
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