Can interspecies love exist? Research supports "yes".

Friendship and affection with animals, as seen from science.

Both people who care for animals and those who have embarked on a vegetarian lifestyle are prone to be criticized for projecting human feelings onto animals who cannot experience them in the same way we do. These criticisms, while they may be true in part (after all, as bipedal and massively social primates we experience reality in a very particular way), are nonetheless guilty of the same thing they criticize: asserting universal truths on the basis of faith.

The truth is that none of us can get inside the head of another living being, much less if that living being is seven branches away from our position on the evolutionary tree. The interspecies love is a complicated phenomenon to study, especially when the behavior one would expect from an animal emotionally involved with a human closely resembles the behavior that would also be expected in a living being that has learned to manipulate its caregiver in order to obtain better treatment.

However, science provides us with tools to learn indirectly about cognitive and emotional phenomena that occur in other organisms. There is one study, in particular, that gives reason for optimism to all those who believe that interspecies love exists.

To speak of interspecies love is to speak of reductionism.

How can how can love be studied scientifically? how can love be studied scientifically? To do so, there is no choice but to resort to a reasonable dose of reductionism. The sensations and moods of non-human animals are so different from ours that, in order to study them, we must focus on the essential aspects that make them similar to us. In this case, reductionism means focusing on a concrete and objective aspect associated with the moods linked to love or affection in our species as well as in many others. Normally, this is done through research focused on the study of hormonal flows.

Interspecies love is such a broad concept that it needs to be reduced to very concrete operational terms if we want to investigate it. At this point, the measurement of oxytocin levels is of particular importance.

The dog-human bond

Oxytocin is a hormone associated with the creation of bonding trusting relationships and maternal behaviors. It is present in a wide variety of living beings, and, therefore, oxytocin levels are an appropriate indicator to quantitatively estimate the moods we relate to love.

With an analysis based on the levels of this substance, it is possible to indirectly know what animals are experiencing when interacting with their human caregivers, and vice versa, thanks to the use of the same meter. same meter for both species.

Based on this premise, a team of Japanese researchers set out to study the emotional states that are triggered in the bodies of domestic dogs when they interact with their caregivers. To do this, they let the dogs and humans interact with each other in pairs and then took urine samples from both the dogs and their playmates.

The results were published in the journal ScienceWhile still based only on the measurement of a chemical substance, they tell us about animals that create powerful emotional bonds with homo sapiens. When dogs look humans in the eye, both species begin to generate more oxytocin. This fact is easier to explain from the "interspecies love" hypothesis than from the hypothesis of animals taking advantage of their masters, since the experiment does not include any material reward for the dogs. for the dogs.

Dogs and emotional loops

Oxytocin, like all hormones, generates dynamics of loop dynamicsIt is both a method of sending instructions from the brain and a substance that informs the brain about what is going on in the body. In the case of dogs and their masters looking into each other's eyesIn addition, researchers have also documented the existence of a loop: the fact that the animal partner spends more time looking at the other (caused by higher than normal oxytocin levels) causes the latter to generate more oxytocin, which in turn means a tendency to look at the other for longer, and so on.

The existence of this hormonal loop, typical of the complex relationships established between humans, is not as well documented in relationships between our species and others, not least because few animals have habits that make it easy to interact peacefully and sustainably with organisms with which they share little evolutionarily. However, this research offers support for the idea that the process of hormonal feedback can be found far beyond our own evolutionary family.

A special case

Of course, while what is documented in the paper While the findings of these researchers can be interpreted as an example of interspecies love (or affective states associated with love), this does not mean that all pairs of species are equally likely to be emotionally involved in the same way. Ultimately, dogs are a special case because they have learned to coexist very well with the sibling. coexist very well with sapiens.. As in almost all subjects, science advances at an ant's pace and few results can be generalized to a large number of cases.

This research also supports the idea that the evolutionary path of domestic dogs may have prepared them especially well to get along with us. The scientists repeated the experiment by replacing the dogs with wolves and, by studying the behavior and hormone levels of these carnivores, they found that they neither endured as much looking into the eyes of the caregivers, nor did their oxytocin levels increase in a comparable way to those of their domestic relatives.

It is worth noting that the dog and the wolf are part of the same species, so the difference between them could be due to a process of recent adaptation that took place in dogs and not in their wild brethren. Dogs might have developed a special interest in the human face and certain baskets, but wolves would not have had that need. Or perhaps, who knows, the key to these different results lies in the fact that humans do not look at some dogs the same as others.