Dogs aren’t just our pets. We also see them as our friends and family members. But do we get the same things out of our interactions with our dogs that we get out of our interactions with our human friends and family?

Having set out to answer this question in a study in Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Hungary has revealed that our relationships with our dogs are a lot like our relationships with our children and our closest friends, albeit with much more control.

“The results highlight that dogs occupy a unique place in our social world — offering the emotional closeness of a child, the ease of a best friend, and the predictability of a relationship shaped by human control — revealing why our bonds with them are often so deeply fulfilling,” said Enikő Kubinyi, a study author and an ethologist (an animal behavior biologist) at ELTE, according to a press release.

Read More: Uncovering the Mystery of Why Dogs Might Look Like Their Owners

A Combination of Child and Close Friend

While dogs are certainly our close companions, whether we relate to them in exactly the same way that we relate to our friends or family members isn’t entirely clear.

Seeking to add clarity, Kubinyi and her colleagues compared the relationships between humans and dogs with those between humans and humans, asking more than 700 participants to rate the characteristics of their bonds with their dog, child, romantic partner, closest relative, and closest friend.

Taken together, the participants’ responses indicate that their interactions with their dogs provided more satisfaction than their interactions with their relatives and their friends, and about as much satisfaction as their interactions with their children and romantic partners. The participants also reported that their relationships with their dogs yielded more companionship and nurturance than their relationships with their romantic partners, relatives, and friends, and about the same amount of affection, reassurance, and reliability as their relationships with their children.

Not only that, the participants also relayed that they felt their interactions with their dogs caused fewer conflicts and less antagonism than their interactions with their romantic partners, relatives, and children.

Overall, the results show that our connections with our dogs resemble our connections with our children and close friends, combining the higher levels of support in child relationships and the lower levels of negative interaction in close friend relationships, with an added plus of relative power. In fact, relative power is one of the biggest distinctions between our interactions with our dogs and our human friends and family, the research seems to suggest.

“The power asymmetry, having control over a living being, is a fundamental aspect of dog ownership for many,” Kubinyi said in the release. “Unlike in human relationships, dog owners maintain full control over their dogs as they make most of the decisions, contributing to the high satisfaction owners report.”

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A Satisfying, Supportive Connection

While the research was mostly concerned with comparing human-dog and human-human relationships, the ELTE researchers also considered how our ties with dogs and humans connect to each other. Assessing their participants’ responses, they found that stronger human-dog relationships corresponded with stronger human-human relationships, indicating that these two types of bonds are complementary rather than compensatory.

“We expected that people with weak human relationships would rely more on their dogs for support, but our results contradict this,” said Dorottya Ujfalussy, another study author and ethologist at ELTE, according to the release. “In our sample, people did not seem to use dogs to compensate for the insufficient support in their human relationships.”

According to the researchers, the participants of the study were self-selected, meaning that they were probably happier with their dogs than the typical dog owners are. That said, the study still contributes to our understanding of our relationships with dogs, which provide us with satisfaction and support in various important ways.

“Dogs offer different kinds of emotional and social support depending on the needs of their owners,” said Borbála Turcsán, another study author and ethologist at ELTE, according to the release. “Some people seek companionship and fun, others need trust and stability, and some simply enjoy having someone to care for.”

Read More: How Does Your Dog Understand You?

Article Sources

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Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.