Oxytocin Makes Your Dog Love You

Benjamin — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 15:11:54 +0000

Oxytocin is the hormone released when humans bond with each other, babies and pets. Meg Daley Olmert’s book “Made for Each Other” speculates on the original formation of bonds between humans and their pets.

Olmert presents a hypothesis that wolf domestication was a catalyst for the dawn of civilization. Trustful bonds with wolves allowed early humans to sleep the whole night. They trusted their wolf friends to alert them to danger with their bark. Deep sleep, which scientists say is connected to processing information and learning, may have spurred an environment of creativity and innovation.

Both you and your dog get a hit of oxytocin when you pet them. Its drug-like effect tames the animals by masking their fight-or-flight instinct making oxytocin responsible for human-pet relations through the aeons.

Listen to this interview with Meg about the human animal bond on KERA’s Think! podcast. [iTunes link]

(Note: I haven’t read the book. I used the interview as the basis of this post.)

Attempting To Understand Whale Behavior

Benjamin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:09:55 +0000

This jaw-dropping story about the heroic rescue by a group of diving buddies of a trapped humpback whale comes from the geniuses at RadioLab on WNYC. What follows the story is a humbling analysis on how animals think, or more precisely, how they don’t think and how we impose human motivations on their animal behavior.

The touching story starts at 3:50 and goes to 18:30 just so you know what you are signing up for when you click “play”. And I sincerely hope you will because its a true animal story unlike any you’ve ever heard.

Link to the full show, notes and comments.

Benjamin Thompson » Animals

Oxytocin Makes Your Dog Love You

Attempting To Understand Whale Behavior