Why we spend nearly $800m on our dogs

Photo / Getty Images.

We take it for granted we love our pets and they love us - and hope it's not just cupboard love on their part.

While Kiwis are passionate pet owners - we have the second-highest rate of pet-owning households in the world - research has shown the love we feel for our dogs in particular may go deeper, and be more subconscious, than we think.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo built on research on parent-child bonding to look into the relationship between pet owners and their "fur babies". They found the "feel-good" hormone oxytocin, considered to play a major parent in human bonding, is also significant in relationships between humans and their pets.

They discovered that when you stare into those "puppy-dog eyes" - or what scientists would call engaging in "mutual gaze" - it increases levels of oxytocin in the urine of both the human and the animal.

Letting the study dogs inhale oxytocin made them engage in more loving gazing, which in turn increased the human's oxytocin level still further. As a control, researchers found the same effect was not seen with wolves, the ancestor of today's domestic dog.

The researchers also found owners who reported the highest relationship satisfaction with their dogs had dogs who maintained mutual gaze with them most frequently.

Evan MacLean, an evolutionary anthropologist and co-director of the Canine Cognition Centre at Duke University in North Carolina, United States, commenting in the American Association for the Advancement of Science journal Science, said this behaviour may have been bred into domesticated dogs - which have a much greater ability to pick up on human social cues than other animals, even apes.

"[The] findings suggest dogs have taken advantage of our parental sensitivities - using behaviours such as staring into our eyes - to generate feelings of social reward and caretaking behaviour. Because these processes are bi-directional, dogs themselves likely experience similar rewards, ensuring that the feedback loop is propagated."
Brain-imaging studies have also shown that, when human mothers view images of their child or their dog, the same network of brain areas - related to emotion, reward and affiliation - are activated.

"Diverse aspects of our biology appear to be tuned into dogs and children in remarkably similar ways," MacLean said.

These findings shed some light on why we tend to think of and treat our dogs, in particular, as part of the whanau - and why last year Kiwis spent around $797 million on their canine companions.

Research by Bombay Petfoods, manufacturers of the Jimbo's brand, showed 61.4 per cent of dog owners wanted their pet to feel like part of the family, 43.4 per cent wanted a settled, companionable relationship and 31.3 per cent wanted a special, unique relationship with their animal.

Just over half of respondents viewed their dogs as "a bit like a furry kid", and just 1.1 per cent as "just a pet". It may also explain why around a third of owners let their dogs sleep on their own or their children's beds and 46 per cent celebrate their dog's birthday.

"It doesn't really matter what the science is behind it - it's just a special relationship," says general manager Dave Allan, owner of nine-year-old "bitzer" Poppy. "But it does go a bit of the way to explaining why being with her just makes me feel good.

"Whatever mood you're in or kind of day you've had, you come home and see the dog and it brings a smile to your face."