The Look of Love

Anyone that has experienced a connection with a dog will understand how important eye contact is and also confirm how good it makes you feel. However, as with everything I have been learning in my recent training it is interesting to hear these things explained in a more formal way.

In 2015 a study was carried out by Takefumi Kikusui, a Japanese animal behaviourist, to examine the impact of the gaze between dogs and their owners.  The outcome was that those owners and dogs that held a mutual gaze for longer periods of time, both experienced higher levels of oxytocin in their urine than those that held gazes for shorter periods.

Oxytocin is a hormone linked with trust and maternal bonding, it increases when you are close to someone you love and is basically what we like to refer to as the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you fall in love.

This gaze between a dog and an owner is important for a number of reasons. Not only do both owner and dog receive a charge of the love hormone but it is also the method by which we gather information about one another.

When your dog needs your help they will use this gaze to guide and ask for your assistance. Your dog will also follow your gaze, normally looking in the same direction and at whatever you are looking at.  You can point at something and your dog will look at where you are pointing.  This is all possible by the fact we are accustomed to looking into and following each other’s eyes.

The other really interesting fact to highlight is that dogs do not usually hold eye contact with each other. Dogs naturally approach each other on an arc and avoid direct eye contact.  In dog training we are taught that if two dogs hold eye contact for 5 seconds or more this can trigger an aggressive response.  Understandably, we ask owners to avoid this happening in class.

In complete opposition we actively encourage owners to build up the amount of time they hold eye contact with their dogs and believe this to be a key method by which owners can successfully communicate and develop a strong bond with their canine friend.  It is a response that dogs have specially adapted and developed by living in close proximity to humans.

I have no doubt that all those thousands of years ago when wolves first made contact with humans, those animals that learnt to hold a human gaze without feeling threatened or behaving in an aggressive way, were also more lightly chosen as human companions.