How connected to your dog do you feel?

Does your dog make and maintain soft eye contact? If you look at them and they look back, what do they do?

Making eye contact and holding a soft gaze requires trust on both sides; it's not the same as staring or using direct eye contact to intimidate or as a warning.

Sadly, many dogs find meeting eye contact with a human worrying. Not for them, the rush of positive feelings when they meet the gaze of their humans, they don't feel the boost in their system linked to the 'feel good factor'. Of course, we know that we also have the benefit of feeling that connection, too, so it's a win/win situation.

Research has been undertaken to try to measure oxytocin levels, in one the researchers state 'Oxytocin (OT) has been shown to play an important role in social bonding in animals. However, it is unclear whether OT is related to inter-species social bonding. In this study, to examine the possibility that urinary OT concentrations of owners were increased by their "dog's gaze", perhaps representing social attachment to their owners, we measured urinary OT concentrations of owners before and after interaction with their dogs https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19124024/

For those of us living with dogs, research attempts to explain what we already know; it feels good to connect to dogs. We don't need obedience or training cues to demonstrate that our dogs feel connected to us; we just need to show them that we see them, recognise their feelings and respond appropriately.