Once all the pups had reached 14 weeks of age, the researchers tested how comfortable these dogs were around people. The crucial point is that each group of pups had just one week of experience around humans, and even during that week they only saw people for half an hour per day. Some pups first met people in their third week of life, some in their fifth, some in their seventh, and so on. There was a study back in the 1960s, when ethical standards were very different than what they are today, in which researchers raised litters of pups without any human contact except for 30 minutes a day for one week. And yet, although it is obvious that dogs form attachments very easily, the limits of that capacity have hardly been explored by behavioral scientists. In Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You, I mustered all the scientific evidence I could find for the contention that what makes dogs special is their exceptional readiness to form strong emotional bonds with members of other species-ourselves in particular.
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