Brain scans found that mothers looking at their own dogs activated some of the same attachment networks as when they looked at their own children — evidence that the bond between humans and pets is biologically real

Brain scans found that mothers looking at their own dogs activated some of the same attachment networks as when they looked at their own children — evidence that the bond between humans and pets is biologically real

Show a mother a photograph of her own dog, then a photograph of her own child, slide her into an MRI scanner, and a good deal of what lights up looks the same. That is the finding that has travelled, usually squeezed into a single sentence: the tie we feel to our pets is “biologically real,” as measurable in the brain as the tie we feel to our children. All of it rests on a single paper. In 2014, a team at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harv…