Why do we love more dogs than people? Essay

Why do we love more dogs than people? Bbaby with no tears Shampoo in their little baby eyes why is that hi everyone Julian here for dnews we love our pets and I don't just mean crazy cat ladies who issue traditional human relationships for feline companionship according to a 2011 Harris Poll 90% of pet dog or cat owning Americans consider their furry cohabiters part of the family movie makers exploit our empathy for animals all the time if we're supposed to like a character we just met given loyal dog and boom instant good guy and yes I realize supervillains have white fluffy cats on their laps when they swivel their armchairs around but I mean come on cats are like the physical embodiment of evil full disclosure I am a dog person but I guess evil things need love too and so here we are with cats and dogs as valuable members of the family they might even be the favorite member of the family because the American Animal Hospital Association's survey married female dog owners that are dog owners who were female and married not owners of married female dogs English anyway 40% of the women surveyed said they got more emotional support from their pet than from their husbands or their children which is terrible come on people call your mother so why do we care about animals or I suppose I should narrow that down why do we care about certain animals after all most of us still eat bacon or chicken but cringe at the thought of eating mr. whiskers it's probably because animals like our house pets are cute they have big eyes they can be kind of clumsy and dumb and they're innocent in that way there are an awful lot like babies and we think of babies is cute because otherwise it would be really easy to abandon a screaming pooping chubby bald mini person in the woods somewhere we feel attached to cute babies even if they're not arms a 2009 University of Munich your study asked women who had never given birth to look at pictures of babies inside an fMRI machine the women were in the machine not the babies English the pictures activated parts of their brains associated with reward and the cuter the baby the more that region lit up men had similar actions but not as strong some of the same chemicals that make people go all melty for babies are present when we deal with pets a recent study found that oxytocin the hormone that facility bonding went up 300% in dog owners who gazed into their pets s and dogs is almost equally innocent but it's not the same with babies and human adult's to illustrate this 240 students at Northeastern University were given four different versions of a fake news story where assailants either severely injured a toddler a puppy a dog or an adult they were then surveyed on their emotional reactions and the puppy elicited a stronger reaction than the dog by only a narrow margin the adult human got the least amount of sympathy by far and the toddler got the biggest response so the good news is that people when it really matters will opt to save a human life over a dog probably Georgia Regents University psychologist asked 573 people what they would do if a bus was hurtling towards a person and a dog and they could only save one if the dog was their personal pet and the person was an unknown tourist the tourists would be a messy red hood ornament 40% of the time if the choice was between a strange tourist and a strange dog though the tourist odds were much better they'd be unwilling bus passengers only 14% of the time interestingly women were almost twice as likely to save the dog which fits in line with the cuteness hypothesis from earlier so I guess if you're going to get hit by a bus try to do it near a man so we like our pets more than adults but we don't like them as much as our babies and for the actual chemical explanation crystal explains what's happening in your brain meats down here pop quiz hotshot there's a dog and a tourist and Hawaiian shirt and sandals with socks on the street a bus is speeding towards them at 50 miles per hour