Dog owners rate their bond with their pet as more satisfying than most relationships with humans and consider their dog their best source of companionship, a study has found.
The absence of negative interactions is one reason why people feel their affinity with their dog is so strong, scientists say.
Researchers from Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary asked more than 700 dog owners to rate 13 relationship characteristics for their dogs and four human partners: their child, romantic partner, closest relative and best friend.
They found the owner-dog relationship is most similar to the child-parent relationship but overall can be interpreted as a mix of child and best friend relationships, combining positive aspects of the child relationship with a lack of negative aspects of friendship, along with having power over the dog.
Owners reported greater satisfaction with their dogs than with any human partner except their child. “They received more support from dogs than from any human partner except their child, and experienced fewer negative interactions with their dogs compared to any human partner, except their best friend,” the study says.
“The dog-human relationship may indeed be the best some owners can get, offering features like unconditional love that may be harder to find in human partners,” researchers concluded.
Human-dog relationships provide support “predominantly via companionship, nurturance and minimal negative interactions”.
“The results highlight that dogs occupy a unique place in our social world — offering the emotional closeness of a child, the ease of a best friend, and the predictability of a relationship shaped by human control — revealing why our bonds with them are often so deeply fulfilling,” said senior author Eniko Kubinyi.
“Unlike in human relationships, dog owners maintain full control over their dogs as they make most of the decisions, contributing to the high satisfaction owners report.”
The study also found that people who have more support in human relationships had stronger dog-owner bonds, suggesting that dogs complement human relationships rather than compensate for their deficiencies.
“We expected that people with weak human relationships would rely more on their dogs for support, but our results contradict this,” says co-author Dorottya Ujfalussy.
“In our sample, people did not seem to use dogs to compensate for the insufficient support in their human relationships.”
But the researchers said that their sample consisted of volunteers who were likely to be more satisfied with their relationships than the average dog owner.
The analysis did not examine similar human-cat bonds, but an earlier study found dogs scored higher on “companionship, nurturance and reliable alliance” than humans, while cats rivalled humans in “nurturance and reliable alliance”.
Source: independent.co.uk
