HanktheDog Blog

Do humans really love?

It's one of those philosophical and scientific questions that the more dogged among us sometimes ask ourselves. In this instance, the question is spurred by an entry (a series of entries, actually) in a blog that I read called Dogma, written by Gina Spadafori. (Mike has her Dogs for Dummies book, a fact that's likely made him a bit easier for me to train.)

Apparently, there are humans who believe that dogs are incapable of love, which is interesting considering the current state of the human-run world. There are wars in which humans who all say they believe in God seem Hell-bent on killing each other in the most horrible ways over matters that are maddeningly unclear to your average canine. There are human growls of hate that spread like venom all over the Internet, human-on-human massacres and mass mutilations the world over, and the development of incalculably cruel weapons capable of destroying millions and perhaps billions. And all this from the one species on the planet capable of love?

I don't know. Maybe humans are just creatures of instinct, little more than sock puppets driven by chemicals and conditionings of which they're barely aware.

Take the case of romantic love, on which so much of human art depends. An article in the LA Times notes that "recent research suggests that romantic attraction is in fact a primitive, biologically based drive, like hunger or sex." Humans know this by sticking each other in magnetized metal tubes (what other species would create such a thing?) and watching how their brains work. The evidence reportedly shows that "the neural mechanisms of romantic attraction are distinct from those of sexual attraction and arousal."

There's something about dopamine receptors and states of euphoria and craving. Being in love is apparently a lot like being addicted to some mind-altering substance that makes you feel wonderful, which may be why humans in love seem to a lot like cats who've had a healthy dose of catnip: happy and wacky and purring with desire.

Here's a bit of irony for the dogs-can't-love group: one of the ways in which humans have studied romantic love is by studying animals during courtship. Dr. Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love, did research in which she looked at various chemical compounds in the human brain because the "attraction animals feel for particular mates is linked with elevated levels of dopamine and/or norepinephrine in the brain." Not so surprisingly, "all three of these chemicals produce many of the sensations of human romantic passions."

Yes, I know there are human loves other than romantic love. There are many kinds of important, emotional bonds that form between people who need people, who are reportedly the luckiest people in the world. But what would those MRI machines show if we looked at the bonds that people feel for family members and bonds that dogs feel for their pack members? I suspect (though I don't wish to be crammed into a metal tube to find out) that the brain patterns would be somehow similar, just as the chemical processes inside courting animals and courting humans are similar.

We species of the Earth are not, perhaps, so dissimilar as some believe. Which both gives me comfort and makes me wonder. It gives me comfort to believe that humans really can feel love, despite their unmatched propensity for horrific violence and hate. But it makes me wonder if we dogs are really as admirable as some believe. If we were given opposable thumbs, would we also devise such instruments of destruction? And would we begin to believe that other species, no matter how clever, are little more than biological machines?