so we’re talking about the idea of love and more specifically the love of dog toward their owner and this is something that I guess most of us kind of heard of but never really considered scientifically now obviously various pet owners will claim that their dogs or their cats love them there’s a lot of proof that they have usually it’s something to do with the behavior that they show but scientifically speaking we could definitely explain it all way with just animal be here for example a dog will obviously be attached to you because it knows that you feel it and it you provide shelter at the same time we don’t really even have a very good definition of what love is but in the last few decades or so a lot of scientific studies have actually established at least one major component to how we can technically describe love scientifically which thus allows us to establish whether dogs and other animals can actually love us or not in other words we can try to find a way to explain the question of Canada love you and at least one researcher from us has been doing quite a lot of different Studies on dog behavior and has recently even published a few books related to what he believes dog really fuel clive wine from Arizona State University is one of these experts that essentially published quite a lot of papers in the last few decades and he does make quite a strong point in regards to dog love so let’s talk a little bit more about this first of all how do we even describe this so-called love well modern science usually refers to love as hormonal response and specifically here we’re talking about one hormone the one you see on the screen this is known as oxytocin oxytocin is a hormone that plays a lot of different roles in our social eyes for example social bonding child births actual romantic dating and it even helps mother produce milk in order to then bond even more with their baby it also actually has an effect on our behaviour and thus seem to produce more pro-social behaviors such as for example helping others different types of romantic attachment different types of generosity feeling trust towards someone and of course other pro-social behavior so in a sense this is the hormone that you can kind of use to describe extreme friendship friendliness and of course loving behavior some of the best studies actually come from studying the reaction mothers have to their newborn children and the world of loving motherly behavior is always associated with much higher levels of oxytocin whereas withdrawal mother withdrawal and depression is associated with much lower levels of oxytocin so measuring this woman can definitely allow us to quantify any so-called loved well it just so happens that some of the modern studies also discovered that our little furry friends our canine friends have a very similar oxytocin response when they see someone that they really love and specifically here we’re talking about what you would call their owner they’re human they do seem to love their human and show this love hormone le and this has also been tested quite thoroughly for example one of the experiments place a dog in an environment where there was a bowl of food and their so-called owner or their human in the same room they’re relatively similar distance to each other when the door was open and the dog was presented with a choice without any exceptions every single dog went for their human first and only after this proceeded to eat the food in other words dogs did show preference for seeing their human first before eating in another study from 2003 scientists have actually learned that when you pat your dog or when people pet their dogs the levels of oxytocin went up after about 20 minutes in both the dog and the owner and the owner could obviously explain this by saying me I love my dog but technically since the dogs can’t speak we can only use the hormone to try to explain what the dogs felt probably also the same feeling as their human and when those studies were replicated in other conditions every single time dogs seem to actually exhibit this oxytocin response to the source of their affection and technically doesn’t have to be a human either because in the last year’s we found at least one known case and this was actually published here on the BBC News as well where the target of dogs oxytocin was not a human but a penguin and specifically in the penguin County that the dog was protecting from all of the foxes that were trying to kill them and even though it’s pretty common for people to atribute this love or other emotions that are only technically human to animals it seems that love does seem to apply to dogs at least from the perspective of hormones and the thing is here we’re not really talking about intelligence at all we’re not really talking about dogs being smarter than other animals because for example dolphins they do possess a lot more intelligence they’re able to communicate using very complex grammar they also are able to actually distinguish themselves in the mirror which most dogs cannot really do but we don’t really know if dolphins can exhibit love we do know that dogs can but now the question becomes how is that even possible how can dogs and not for example wolves which don’t seem to exhibit the same effect have this and some of the recent studies were finally able to answer this and to try to answer the question of how this is possible we have to talk a little bit more about genetics and specifically a relatively unknown disorder known as Williams syndrome Williams syndrome is essentially a genetic disorder characterized by certain changes in appearance while at the same time unfortunately also causing certain intellectual disabilities sometimes there are more severe than others but in most cases what makes Williams syndrome unique is how it affects the social behavior of people with this genetic disorder without exception they all become extremely social extremely friendly and basically only wanting to be loved and to provide love to others it’s literally what you would call and I know this is going to sound cheesy but being a wonderful person so in other words it’s one of the more unique and more unusual genetic disorders with some of the people becoming relatively famous as well because of their friendliness and the fun fact here is that the so called legend of elfs or these friendly creatures that used to exist in the Victorian era may actually have come from people suffering from this disorder back in the seventeen 1600s which is very likely where all of the elven mythology began from so next time you hear about elfs in any kind of fantasy books or movies think of where it all started but what do elves and people with Williams syndrome have to do with what we’re talking about dog love well turns out that everything it turns out that these same genes that affect people would boolean syndrome seem to affect dogs or in other words dogs seem to be well wolf would Willian syndrome or at least a kind of a variant of that syndrome and it seems to affect them in a somewhat similar way to the way it affects humans they want to have a lot of love they want to express love and they want to be a really friendly way toward the whatever is their source of or an target of affection and all of this previous studies from the last years seem to show that really all that dogs want from us is to be with us and to be in our company they don’t really care about food as much as they care about us neither do they care about so-called pack leader as many training books teaches they just want to have this feeling of oxytocin in their brain the order we just want to have their social needs met and to show love and to be loved as well and because this genetic component has been identified and actually tested and retested several times it does seem to provide an idea that well all of this is genetic and hormonal it’s not just something that we attribute to dogs just because the way that we usually think about other animals in other words it seems that dogs evolved to be this way in the last eight to ten thousand years their genes changed to have them have this unusual behavior that seems to be not really present in any other animal except for human beings so far we’re twist nothing concrete have been able to identify in for example cats dolphins or so on and because we believe that the purpose of oxytocin is to strengthen the social connections we now definitely believe that it was actually this genetic component is genetic disorder that allowed dogs to express these feelings that they previously did not have an interest knowing just like people with Williams syndrome dogs are also extremely social they want to interact with pretty much everyone and they constantly appear or really happy something that their ancestors wolves do not necessarily share at all and what’s more a one of these recent studies have also established that dogs seem to react much better to just being praised than to be fed in other words they don’t really care about food just as much as we think they do instead they want to be talked to they want to be held they want to be played with and Pat it all the time and this is something that was established using various MRI studies when the dogs were put in certain conditions and brains were scanned to see if they responded in a certain way so in other words all this is pure science but we’re still not entirely sure when all of this happens we believe that they probably occurred about eight to ten thousand years ago but we don’t know what caused all of these genetic disorders to suddenly appear but there is a really important takeaway here and that’s in regards to how we train our dogs all of these books that focus on us becoming the so-called pack leader or training dogs by being really strict with them are technically completely wrong we should be doing the opposite these finding bundles of joy only want to feel loved and they don’t want to be isolated they want to be with you and all your dog really wants is to make you happy as well and this is something that we definitely to remember next time we try to punish your dog for for example pooping on the floor or chewing our favorite shoes or still in a cable and then destroying it all which just happened to me yesterday but you know those are all choices are made when I adopted this dog so this is something I’m going to have to deal with for a while anyway so hopefully now you know a little bit more about dogs and how they truly do love you scientifically speaking and if you’re not a dog person and more of a cat person well I’ll try to find something about cats but so far it seems that they are kind of the opposite exhibiting more of an evil not love hormone which I’m gonna have to do some research on anyway on that note thank you so much for watching hopefully you enjoy this video and hopefully in the next few weeks I will finally be able to organize some kind of a fundraiser but if not I’ll make sure to do this sometime in summer when the whole virus thing goes away and whether you have a dog or not I thought that this is something important I thought that this is something that most of us really need to be aware of considering that dogs are technically the second most common pets after cats but anyway once we learn more about dogs or cats or other animals or once I discover another really interesting study I’ll make sure to follow this up in one of the future videos until then thank you so much for watching subscribe these two haven’t sure this was someone who loves learning about space and Sciences and these things dogs and other animals and oh my god his breath really smells I need to brush his teeth anyway I’ll see you guys later yo that’s a good boy spaced out and as always bye you need to smile and you smile you can’t smile look at that face it doesn’t smile so we said and welcome to what the math okay he’s about to lick me and his breath really smells bad oh I think he’s actually enjoying this huh maybe I should bring him more often