A recent series of studies in the U.S. suggest that dogs recognise kindness and give trust in return; that they experience emotions such as love and attachment, like humans.
Unlike previous research into canine sentience, this time researchers were able to use an MRI.
The scan enabled the researchers to map activity in the caudate nucleus — that area of the brain where emotions can be measured in dogs as in humans. They found that activity increased in response to hand signals indicating food, smells of familiar dogs and people, and the return of a familiar human. A subsequent experiment showed activity increased when dogs heard the voice of someone familiar.
The inescapable conclusion, wrote one of the researchers, Gregory Burns, in an op-ed in the New York Times, was that “dogs are people, too”.
This will come as no surprise to dog lovers. They know for sure that dogs love them back. But do people think about their rights.
Treatment
Even in a supposedly dog-loving country like Australia, in which 40 per cent of households have a dog, many people treat them badly and think nothing of it — in research laboratories, in commercial breeding operations known as puppy farms, at the dog racing track. Otherwise law-abiding people keep dogs chained, leave them alone in apartments, or abandon them when they are deemed too difficult. Then they’re put down at the pound because people prefer to get a dog from a puppy farm by way of a pet shop.
There is a moral imperative to reassess how they are treated under law.
“We must reconsider their treatment as property,” says Burns.
Dogs are not property. They are loyal, loving companions who reward kindness and consistency with devoted service. That gives them a special place in our lives and the right not to be abandoned, enslaved, demonised, turned into vicious guards or even treated as fashion accessories. They deserve respect. And their rights are not lesser rights, separate from human rights; giving dogs the protection they deserve adds to our humanity.
