Videos of war veterans reuniting with their families might be one of the defining Internet phenomena of recent years. Even if you haven’t seen one, you can picture the scene. A soccer field, school assembly, or front yard serves as the backdrop for a cluster of kids who are unaware of what’s about to happen. Then, the children turn around to see their mother in uniform approaching; or someone opens a giant box, and out pops their dad. The kids scream, cry, and laugh as they launch themselves into their parents’ arms. Who can resist the poignancy of these family moments, or watch them unfold without tearing up?

Interestingly, another kind of veteran reunion video often outpaces the parent-child ones in online shares. It’s the soldier-dog reunion. In these videos, the returning serviceperson walks into the room or climbs out of a car, taking her dog by surprise. The dog sees his owner from across the parking lot and bolts out of the back of a pickup to say hello. In their own doggy way, the canines laugh, cry, and hug for the camera just like any human family member would, rapturous with joy at the reunion.

These scenes prompt a question: We know children love their parents and feel their absence deeply, and vice versa. Dogs, too, clearly recognize and miss their owners—but what, exactly, do dogs feel at these times? To us, it looks like love, but could that be what it really is?

The Look of Dog Love

To answer the love question, we need to reach back over our preceding discussions about empathy, bonding, play, and reading human gestures—all the way back to my skeptical theologian friend. He put the question in simple, behavioral terms: Do dogs only act like they love us because it helps them get what they want? Or could it be that there truly is something deeper going on in there? And what is love, anyway?

In the Christian tradition, love is a profound feeling that expresses itself generously, even sacrificially, on the behalf of another. Love is what compelled God to send Jesus to the cross, turning death into life. Love for enemies leads us to pray for and serve those who don’t return the favor. A mother’s love for her son is why she’s willing to sit in a freezing ice rink for what seems like the entire prime of her life, learning to love ice hockey. Her boy is crazy about hockey, and she’s crazy about him, so she bundles up and steps into the icebox just to make him feel special.

When empathy, intimacy, and pleasure with another person motivate intentional acts of caring, that’s love—and there’s life-altering power in it. This is why in the New Testament, when Jesus asks Peter if he loves him, and Peter says “Yes,” Jesus replies, “Then feed my sheep” (John 21:17). To love Jesus is to join him in his intention to love the world. “You cannot say you love God,” Jesus says, “and hate your brother or sister,” for you have not participated in the intentions of God to forgive, heal, and reconcile all that is broken (1 John 4:20).

Yet, wait a minute. We’re talking canines here, not The Greatest Story Ever Told. We have to keep all four feet on the ground.

Still, we’ve been accumulating solid evidence in the previous chapters that dogs do indeed experience something that looks a lot like love. Here’s what I mean:

First, we looked at a dog’s desire to be near its human owner. Then we described a dog’s astonishing and unique impulse to know the intention, watch the face, and read the gestures of people, especially the central person or people in its life.

From there, we took an extended journey into the building blocks of any higher relationship: empathy and kindness, bonding and healing play. We saw how dogs and humans give and receive these spiritually charged gifts in a well-defined, sharing friendship that’s found nowhere else in nature.

Finally, we saw how a dog’s unconditional affection, often its mere presence, can help humans calm down (so we can read for the teacher) and open up to the divine miracle of the moment.

All that doesn’t exactly equal love, but in any human relationship, it would certainly be taken as that—and it moves us further from “dogs love bacon” and closer to “dogs love us.”

The point is that love is a complicated thing; we both demand that those we love speak it out loud and claim that love is more than words. Still, few couples can actually move forward in their relationship until someone says those dreaded and glorious words, “I love you.” Oddly, as much as we need to hear those words, we know that love is more than words, as the ’90s band Extreme taught us with long hair, good looks, and the strums of an acoustic guitar.

More than words is all you have to do to make it real

Then you wouldn’t have to say that you love me

Cause I’d already know.

So for human beings, love is about verbal proclamation and yet, equally, about actions and intentions. Clearly we know our dogs can’t talk (though that would be awesome), but they do seem oddly wired for our communication. Also, though they can’t directly talk, their intentionality seems strong enough for us to explore whether our butt-licking dogs do indeed love us.

Words for the Heart, and the Brain

Once, after Kirby stayed with friends while we were on vacation, our friend who had watched him said, “I’ve never seen a dog who knows so many words. It was almost eerie how he picked up on what we were saying.” I wasn’t surprised. Even before baby Maisy could call out to Kirby with “Come, Daaga!” when all she could manage was a delighted squeal or scream of summons from another room, Kirby would sense her intentions and come running. He was not only good at knowing words but he was also eager to use those words, or even nascent stabs at communication, to be with us.

Dogs are willing, even eager, to decipher and understand what our sounds mean. They will pretty much learn as many words as we take the time to teach, often amassing a vocabulary of one hundred words or more. (You can spell it out—w-a-l-k—or start saying “ambulate,” so you and your spouse can make a plan without sending Hector the hound into a froth of anticipation, but since the new word is attached to one of Hector’s deepest desires, you’re probably just buying time.)

We take for granted our pooches’ responsiveness to words, but we shouldn’t. It is deeply meaningful to us that dogs respond to our words, because language is our primary means for connecting with others. It is harder for us to know if our cats care because they seldom come when we call them by name—and even if they do, they rarely come with the joy and excitement that our dogs do.1

This desire to respond to our words bears the weight of love because dogs sense the emotions behind our words. Dogs don’t understand the meaning of every sentence, but they read our joy, sadness, excitement, worry, or anger with uncanny skill. And their faces communicate that our words have emotional impact on them. As I’ve just said, ask any boyfriend or girlfriend: words of love can feel an awful lot like the real thing.

Of course, for a more objective understanding—and one that is more likely to convince the skeptics—we still need to take a look inside, getting a little science to show that indeed this intention on the part of dogs to be with us by soaking up our words means love. Fortunately, in the last few years, scientists have done just that.

A few years after Hare and Tomasello’s pioneering work at Emory, a neuroeconomist (yes, that’s a real thing) named Gregory Berns set out to examine whether dogs had the mind to love people. To find his answer, he decided to scan dogs’ brains to see if he could determine if we were indeed on their minds.

Taking an MRI of a dog brain isn’t difficult: just sedate the dog and let the machine click and clack away. Yet this kind of scan would tell Berns and his team very little, for it would show a dog’s brain only in neutral. What they hoped to show was a dog’s brain in drive—the drive to respond to and be with us. For this kind of research, the functional MRI (fMRI) was the way to go—but for the researchers to collect the data, the dog would need to be awake. So, over several months, Berns trained family dogs (including his own) to do an extraordinary task: crawl into the noisy, enclosed metal tube of the scanning machine and lie completely still. This is something most adult humans balk at.

As the dog in the study lay in the tube, the family member who trained it would speak to it, giving it directions and the reward of human presence—and at strategic moments, a little hot dog. Sure enough, the images Berns was able to take were astonishing.

The first thing Berns noticed was that the dog’s mirror neurons fired in response to the human handler. Mirror neurons are the neurons of cooperation, the neurological building blocks of empathy. Berns said, “Seeing this kind of mirror neuron activity in Callie and McKenzie [two dogs studied] meant that the whole dog-human relationship was not just a scam. If dogs had the ability to transform human actions into their own doggy equivalent, then maybe they really did feel what we feel. At least a dog version of it.”2

Berns believed that he had shown that dogs have a mind for us, as Hare’s experiment had also indicated, but did the fMRI scans show whether dogs love us as much as they love hot dogs? Berns concluded that they did. He says, “The inferior temporal activation told us that the dogs remembered their human family…These patterns of brain activation looked strikingly similar to those observed when humans are shown pictures of people they love.”3

Another scientist, ethologist Vilmos Csányi, came to a similar conclusion about the dog-human connection. He wrote:

I’m not a religious man, and I pause before using the word soul. But my experiences with the dogs in my life…convince me that there is some profound essence, something about being a dog, which corresponds to our notion of…soul, the core of our being that makes us most human. In human animals, this core, I am convinced, has to do with our ability to reach out and help a member of another species, to devote our energy to the welfare of that species, even when we do not stand to benefit from the other—in short, to love the other for its own sake. If any species on earth shares this miraculous ability with us….it is the dog, for the dog truly loves us sometimes beyond expectation, beyond measure, beyond what we deserve, more, indeed than we love ourselves.4

What can we conclude? Well, since humans (thankfully) have never been able to reduce love to a particle or potion, we shouldn’t expect to finally prove canine love with a brain scan. And let’s admit that in our human relationships, you and I carry proofs of love in our hearts, not file folders.

Kirby didn’t have to say he loved us. We already knew. He had already shared love—what Csányi calls “this miraculous ability”—with the Root family for years. When he died, my family lost a beloved friend.

Still, it’s nice to know that scientists Berns and Csányi would argue that we also lost a being who truly loved us back.