Almost half of all Americans have a dog, so it’s safe to assume that a lot of you have a soft, fluffy, kind, loyal, friend in your house. We all love our dogs, and they love us, but why?

You make think it’s because we give them food. That is actually not true. According to a study at Emory University, dogs have a twenty percent stronger response to praise than to food. Your dog thinks of you as more than a walking restaurant.

Dogs descend from wolves. Somewhere along the line there was a mutation in the genes of wolves that caused the wolves to be more sociable. When our ancestors met our dogs’ ancestors, some wolves liked the humans more than others. Those dogs stayed, and now after breeding the gene mutation for centuries, we ended up with our dogs.

After centuries of the same gene mutation and loving our praise, it shows that our dogs really do love us, and we love them.