Does Your Dog Really Love You and What Does That Really Mean? A Journey in Cognitive Science and Moral Philosophy

“Our inability to read dogs’ emotions well probably begins with our inability to understand our own emotions well.”

That humans love their dogs is a fundamental fact of our animal heart, as indisputable and irrepealable as gravity — just look at Lord Byron’s leaden eulogy for his beloved dog. But whether our dogs “love” us and what that really means is a question that hurls the human heart into perennial restlessness, oscillating between absolute, arrogant certainty and endless, insecure dou...