We’re not barking mad: dogs really do have a superpower that makes us happier
Tom Ough discovers that our canine chums boost our wellbeing by forcing us to go out, exercise more and meet people
It was just a few minutes into my first meeting with Wes, a six-month-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel owned by my friend Nick, that he leapt into my lap, reared up on his tiny golden legs, and started licking my face with the urgency of a human trying to put out a kitchen fire.
It was as if he’d been told to let no part of my face go unlicked. The onslaught even extended to my ear canal. I writhed in my seat, prised Wes off me, and handed him to my girlfriend. But despite being thickly coated in Wes’s spit, I was already besotted. The four of us at the table spent the evening talking about Wes, laughing at Wes, and enjoying his hyper-affectionate ministrations. Dogs, I thought, must be among the surest possible guarantors of human happiness.
Or are they? Whether dogs make us happy is a less straightforward question than we might imagine. It’s a question with which Laurie Santos, professor of psychology at Yale and architect of its most popular course of all time, Psychology and the Good Life, recently wrestled in her podcast, The Happiness Lab.
Santos is also the director of Yale’s Canine Cognition Center, which studies how dogs make sense of the world. Working at the centre, she was struck by the emotional transformation undergone by students after even a single shift. They would go from stressed to delighted, she recalled on the podcast – a change not unlike the one I experienced when I met Wes. Santos’s observation of her students chimed with existing scientific evidence of the “pet effect”, whereby stroking a dog seems to lower our cardiac stress more than if we’re talking to a human or relaxing alone.
As Santos tells me after the release of the podcast, though, it wasn’t the case that a dog’s mere presence would always make us happy. “The thing that I found so striking was that it’s not the dog’s presence that seems to make us happy. It’s how dogs change our behaviour. They seem to make us more mindful, they seem to make us more social, they seem to get us out, exercising more – and all of these are things that we know boost happiness.
“And so the message of the episode is that, yes, having a dog around can make you happy; but really the causal reason for your happiness, the reason that you’re becoming happier, is because of your own behaviours, and that dogs are changing your behaviour. And that’s kind of a good piece of advice – it means we can change our behaviour ourselves.”
In sharing this insight, Santos was drawing on the work of Carri Westgarth, a podcast guest and the senior lecturer in human-animal interaction at the University of Liverpool. Dr Westgarth, author of The Happy Dog Owner, told Santos: “Everybody who studies this [field] probably generally really likes animals, and wants to show a positive effect because they believe that there is a positive effect of pets in our lives. Actually, what we find is that a number of studies show no difference between people who don’t own pets and people who do; or they show that the dog owners, for example, have worse levels of depression.”
Alas. Still, we generally benefit significantly from the habits that dogs force us into. “Dogs definitely make us more physically active,” Westgarth tells me. “The other thing they do is they help us connect with people. There’s definitely lots of scientific evidence showing that.
When you go out on a walk, people are more likely to talk to you if you’re walking with a dog than if you’re walking without a dog. And people who own a pet have more community social connections, and more social capital, than people without a pet.”
Dogs have a similar effect, says Santos, on our mindfulness. It’s good for us to pay attention to the sensations of the present moment rather than dwelling on worries. “Many of us engage in meditation practices, and other practices that allow us to experience more mindfulness,” Santos says. “But it can be easier to do it when you have a good example around you, and dogs are just that example. They tend to pay attention to so much, and they’re so present.”
Nick, the friend who owns Wes, tells a similar story. Nick and his girlfriend take Wes, who is named after the Premier League-winning Leicester City captain Wes Morgan, for a walk in the morning and in the evening.
“The best part of my day,” Nick says, “is often waking up, feeding Wes, and the two of us taking him for a morning walk. We discuss what’s happening in the day and actually find quality time to chat with each other, rather than waking up, getting in the shower, and going straight to work. We have a flask of tea, have a sit-down, and – especially if it’s not raining – it can be really nice.”
Nick also reports that Wes makes visits to pubs and cafés much more convivial by charming friends and serving staff alike. This all adds up to an enjoyable dog-owning experience – one that would be much less enjoyable if Wes weren’t well-trained. “It’s really stressful to have to live with a dog that’s got behavioural problems,” says Westgarth, explaining that even people who consider themselves loving and attentive owners often miss early signs that dogs are stressed or unhappy. The first 16 months of a dog’s life, she says, are crucial for ensuring the dog is well-socialised and familiar with potentially frightening stimuli, such as the sounds of washing machines, lorries and fireworks. The quality of the breeder is very important, says Westgarth; you should buy puppies only from breeders who are qualified in using rewardbased training methods.
You’ll find that a new puppy seems almost perfectly designed to arouse human affection – far more so than the wolves from whom all dogs are descended. As Clive Wynne, a behavioural scientist and founding director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, tells me, the course of events probably went something like this: tens of thousands of years ago, possibly in more than one place, a group of wolves got in the habit of scavenging the half-eaten bones and suchlike left by a band of itinerant hunter-gatherers. The wolves, already having a good source of food, didn’t attack the humans, and would raise the alarm when predators such as bears drew near. “That meant,” says Dr Wynne, “that the people started to take an active interest in them. They started thinking: ‘Well, you know, maybe we should make sure there’s always some leftovers for these animals because they’re kind of useful to have around.’” Then, says Wynne, “the big change happens”.
As Westgarth says: “There are things like the way dogs have evolved to make eye expressions, and certain ways we’ve designed breeds to look, so that they look more babyish in their faces. They’ve got bigger eyes, they can raise their eyebrows in a certain way” – that famous puppy-dog look, which dogs display only to humans rather than other dogs – “that makes us go gooey over them.”
Thus we can’t help falling in love with dogs. But crucially, says Wynne, dogs fall in love with us, too. “Their superpower is their incredible capacity for love, their amazing affection. Experiencing that kind of unconditional love in your life lifts you up.”
How did dogs end up like this? Wynne, the author of Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You, explains. “There were some changes in the genetic material along the way that mean that dogs have a capacity, or drive, to form strong emotional connections very, very readily and very easily. If we saw it in our own species, you’d actually think that there was something wrong with people.”
Nick has been trying his best to clamp down on Wes’s face-licking, by the way. Dropping his voice to a half-whisper, he confides that Wes “is a little bit dense. He’s just pure love. He’s actually not the smartest dog in the world – he just lives for giving hugs”.
One can imagine the horror of Wes’s fearsome lupine forefathers if they’d known what their descendants would become. Then again, dogs are the beloved sidekick of the most powerful species on Earth. They have won the game of evolution, and they’ve done it by making us happy.