From the studio, a piece on companionship.
There is a study I keep coming back to.
In 2017, researchers at the University of Lincoln in England did an experiment with dogs and human emotions. They played dogs recordings of human voices, some in angry tones and some in happy tones, and simultaneously showed the dogs photographs of human faces with matching or mismatching expressions. The dogs looked longer at the faces that matched the voice, which meant they had the cognitive ability to integrate emotional information across two senses at once. This is something we used to think only humans and a few primates could do.
That was not the finding that stuck with me. The finding that stuck with me was that the dogs were not being trained to do this. They didn't have to learn. They just did it. The researchers concluded that dogs may have evolved the ability to read human emotional states, over the roughly forty thousand years they have been living alongside us, because it turned out to be a survival advantage. Dogs who could read the room got fed. Dogs who couldn't didn't.
I think about that a lot when I'm sitting on the couch feeling something I can't quite name, and my dog walks over and puts her head on my leg.
There is a growing body of research on what dogs can detect about humans, and the more you read of it, the more you realize that we are being observed by a very quiet expert every single day. Dogs can smell changes in our cortisol levels. Cortisol is the hormone the body releases under stress, and it comes out through the skin in tiny amounts. Dogs can smell this from across the room. A 2022 study at Queen's University Belfast confirmed what dog trainers had suspected for decades. Dogs can distinguish stressed human breath and sweat from non-stressed samples with about 94 percent accuracy.
Some dogs are trained to use this ability. Service dogs for veterans with PTSD are taught to detect the pre-symptoms of a panic attack, sometimes minutes before the human is consciously aware of what is happening. The dog will nudge, or lean, or lie across the human's lap, before the human's own body has told them anything is wrong. It sounds mystical. It is not mystical. It is a nose that has been optimized for forty thousand years to notice things about you that you have not yet noticed about yourself.
I don't have a service dog. I have a golden retriever who eats her breakfast at 6:30 and then usually goes back to sleep. But I have noticed, on the days when I am carrying something in my body that I haven't figured out yet, she is closer to me than usual. She lies with her back against my legs. She follows me from room to room when normally she'd let me leave. She doesn't do anything about it. She just knows.
There is something worth sitting with in this. Most of us go through our lives being partially known by other humans, and we get used to that. Even the people who love us have to be told what we're feeling, because from the outside, especially in adult women who have been trained to hold it together, there aren't many signals to read. We put on a face for the world. The face is convincing.
But our dogs are not reading our faces. They are reading our chemistry. They can't be fooled by the face.
I don't want to make this bigger than it is. Dogs are not saints. They are not therapists. They can't process complex human emotion and they don't understand what we're going through, in any meaningful sense of the word understand. What they can do is register a change in the person they live with, and respond to that change with proximity. That's not nothing. In a lot of ways it's more than most humans are able to do, and more than most humans are able to receive.
I think this is part of why living with a dog is different from living with any other kind of animal, and different from a lot of relationships with other humans. There is no need to explain yourself. There is no need to have already figured out what's wrong. The dog is not waiting for a diagnosis. She is not going to give advice. She is not going to want to have a follow-up conversation about it next week. She is just going to sit closer to you, until whatever it is has passed.
Some mornings I wake up and I can tell my mood is off before I have thought about anything at all. And Juno has already known this, from about a minute after I woke up, and she is already in position. Sometimes I don't even realize she's there until I look down.
If you live with a dog, you know what I mean. If you don't, I don't know if any amount of writing about it is going to convey it. It is one of the small mercies of being alive, this kind of witness we get to have. It doesn't fix anything. It doesn't need to.