Buddy, I Was Born This Way  

A scientific study published recently in the journal Nature looked at fraternal and identical twins and found that the desire to have a dog is at least 50 percent genetic. (The researchers compared more than 80,000 twins in the Swedish twin registry with dog registration records.)

 

In other words, it's not (just) that having a dog as a kid was awesome and you want to do it again (and again), but rather that your parents may have passed down a dog-loving gene.

 

A previous twin study found that identical twins are more likely to spend similar amounts of time playing with their dogs than fraternal twins, also suggesting that the love of dogs has a strong genetic component.

 

So why study this? There are two questions the study could help answer. The first is how dogs benefit our health. Science has shown that dog owners are likely to be healthier than non-dog owners, but it's unclear whether the dog is what causes better health. That makes doctors less likely to recommend dogs to people who are obese or depressed - or suffering from any of the other conditions dog owners are less likely to have. The new study considers that the same genes that spur dog ownership may also lead to the better health outcomes.

 

This is kind of bad news, because it erodes the case you might make to your boss or landlord that you need your dog with you to improve your health.

 

The other area of interest is how dogs ceased being wolves and started cuddling up with humans. The study hypothesizes that a genetic variant could have increased some ancient humans' interest in wolves, and over time these early dog enthusiasts trained the wolves to tolerate humans.