Dogs are described as man’s best friend — but they’re more like our surrogate children, a neuroscientist has said.
With their big eyes and helpless natures, pets may, in fact, have hijacked our evolutionary impulse to look after infants, according to Dr Dean Burnett.
Dr Burnett told Cheltenham Science Festival: “We are hardwired to respond to things that remind us of babies — so cats, dogs, and puppies.”
He said it is the only real explanation for why we keep cats around.
“Try explaining cat ownership, particularly to an alien,” he said. “The alien would ask, ‘It is a highly evolved predator — and you keep it in your house?’”
The neuroscientist, who talks about his five-year-old cat Pickle in Emotional Ignorance, his bestselling book on the science of emotion, says cats and dogs have many of the same traits as human infants. He explained that we were evolutionarily hardwired to emotionally invest in babies so that adults don’t abandon children after birth.
But this caregiving urge has accidentally “spilled over” to our pets. Dr Burnett said: “Dogs and cats are small with big heads and eyes, they can’t speak, they are often playful, but they depend on us much. We are emotionally sensitive to these traits because they are just like those of babies, so we want to protect them.”
A 2014 study by Harvard-affiliated researchers found mothers’ brains lit up similarly as they looked at pictures of their children and their dogs, suggesting the same emotion.
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