Little People in Dog Suits

This is how my late father-in-law and his son, my husband, have always referred to our dogs because they, like the researchers that have recently discovered this too, knew that dogs really are just little people in dog suits. If it isn't obvious by your dog’s behavior we now have a study of dogs’ MRIs that show a striking similarity between dogs and humans in both the structure and function of a key brain region: the caudate nucleus. For people this area of the brain plays a key role in the anticipation of things we enjoy, such as food, love, music, and money. In the dogs in this study the same area of the brain was activated by the smells of familiar humans and signals for food. Does this study prove that dogs love us? Nope, but many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. The study that concluded that dogs just might have the ability to experience positive emotions, like love and attachment, and this indicates that dogs have a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child. It was conducted by Gregory Berns, a professor of neuroeconomics and his friend Mark Spivak, a dog trainer that helped train volunteer dogs to go into the MRI without anesthesia.

I am no researcher so I didn’t need a study to prove that dogs have emotions. I've always known dogs were just little people in dog suits.