Can Love Exist Between Species? Research Supports ‘yes’
Both people who care for animals and those who have embarked on a vegetarian lifestyle are prone to criticism for projecting human feelings onto animals that 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) do not fail to commit the same thing they criticize: affirming universal truths based on 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. He love between species It is a phenomenon that is complicated to study, and even more so when the behavior that would be expected from an animal emotionally involved with a human is very similar to the behavior that would also be expected in a living being that has learned to manipulate its caregiver to obtain better treatment.
However, science gives us tools to indirectly know the cognitive and emotional phenomena that occur in other organisms. There is a study, in particular, that gives reasons for optimism to all those people who believe that love between species exists.
Talking about love between species is talking about reductionism
How can be studied scientifically love? 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, to study them, we must focus on the essential aspects that make them similar to us. In this case, using reductionism means focusing on a specific and objective aspect associated with the states of mind linked to love or affection both in our species and 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, it is important, above all, to measure oxytocin levels.
The dog-human emotional bond
Oxytocin is a hormone associated with the creation of emotional ties 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 that we relate to love.
With an analysis based on the levels of this substance, it is possible to indirectly know what the animals are experiencing when interacting with their human caregivers, and vice versa, thanks to the use of a same meter for both species.
Starting from this premise, a team of Japanese researchers set out to study the emotional states that are triggered in the body of domestic dogs when interacting with their caregivers. To do this, they let the dogs and humans interact with each other in pairs and, immediately afterwards, took urine samples from both the dogs and their playmates.
The results that were published in the journal Science, although they are 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 eyes, both species begin to generate more oxytocin. This fact is easier to explain from the hypothesis of “love between species” than from that of animals that take advantage of their masters, since the experiment does not include any material reward for the dogs.
Oxytocin, like all hormones, generates dynamics of loop, since it is both a method of sending instructions from the brain and a substance that informs the brain about what is happening in the body. In the case of dogs and their masters looking into each other’s eyes researchers have also documented the existence of a loop: the fact that the animal pair spends more time looking at each other (caused by higher than normal levels of oxytocin) causes the latter to generate more oxytocin, which the same time means a tendency to look at the other for longer, etc.
The existence of this hormonal loop, typical of the complex relationships established between humans, is not so well documented in the relationships between our species and others, among other things because there are few animals whose habits make peaceful and sustained interaction with organisms easy. with those who share little evolutionarily. However, this research offers support for the idea that the hormonal feedback process can be found far beyond our own evolutionary family.
A special case
Of course, although what is documented in the paper of these researchers can be interpreted as an example of interspecies love (or affective states associated with love), that does not mean that all species couples are equally likely to be emotionally involved in the same way. Ultimately, dogs are a special case for having learned to coexist very well with sapiens As in almost all topics, science advances at an ant’s pace and there are few results that 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, replacing the dogs with Wolves and, studying the behavior and hormonal levels of these carnivores, they found that they could not last as long looking into the eyes of their caregivers, nor did their oxytocin levels increase in a way comparable to those of their domestic relatives.
It should be noted 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 which were carried out in dogs and not in their wild brothers. 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 is that humans do not look at some dogs the same as others.
