Do dogs love us?

I had an interesting conversation with a friend today about whether or not dogs "love."I wanted to write this up, as well as add some of my posts with my friend. We are behavior and training nerds, so this may get a bit confusing.

Her question was about praise being a conditioned reinforcer or not. What do dogs associate with praise to make it reinforcing to them? Her theory was higher-order conditioning where the dog associates praise with the tone of voice which is then associated with food. Mine was that praise reinforces the social bond between trainer and dog. In essence, that praise denotes love.

But to say that dogs love, would assume that they are capable of complex emotions including jealousy, spite, and hate, right? Not necessarily. Although altruistic behavior (actions that benefit the recipient but not the actor) has been found in species other than humans, spiteful behavior (actions that benefit neither the actor nor recipient) never has. So I am much more comfortable saying that dogs can do things out of "love" than I am saying that they can do things out of "spite." In any case, love itself is not altruistic. I believe both actor and recipient get something out of a mutual bond.

One thing we like to say is that dogs are "innocently selfish." I agree... to an extent. I think that love can be a very selfish action. I think people are pretty selfish too, though. Even selfless things have some reward. I work in dog rescue because it makes me feel good to save lives. I am not under the illusion that I do it out of the goodness of my heart.

So do dogs "love" us? I don't know. I believe that they do... but I will never really know.