Here is an interesting article on the cover of Time Magazine about animal friendships and that scientists don’t believe dogs form real friendships: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/02/09/animal-friendships-my-cover-story-for-time-magazine/. It elicited a lot of blog postings from animal lovers around the world claiming it is ridiculous.
The points on both sides are interesting though largely they agree. One side says they have not witnessed true friendships and see more of a guardian relationship; however, they admit there have not been enough studies to conclude anything. The other side says they love dogs and spend their lives with them, so it is lunacy to say there aren’t real friendships. They think more studies should be done before conclusions are made.
It seems likely that given the growing importance of dogs in society that we will be increasingly allocating more studies and time to analyzing our relationships with dogs so this article seems to point out that we are heading in that direction.
We do not have any conclusions, but we think it is highly surprising that such a conclusion would be made without the data. The key variable also appears to be how scientists define friendships and what variables they are including. We look forward to seeing the studies done on this, but if the bond between dogs and others don’t count as friendships we need another word to describe it. Either way, consider us wanting more of dog/human type relationships in our lives, whatever the word they come up with for it.