They really are fur babies!Why we love our pets as much as we love our children

Dogs are said to be man’s best friend, but neuroscientists say dogs are more like our surrogate children.

According to Dr. Dean Burnett, pets with their big eyes and helpless nature may have actually hijacked humans’ evolutionary urge to care for infants.

“We’re hardwired to respond to anything that reminds us of babies—cats, dogs, puppies,” Dr Barnett said at the Cheltenham Science Festival.

This is the only real explanation for why we keep cats, he said.

“Especially for aliens, try explaining how to keep a cat,” he says. “Aliens will ask, ‘This is a highly evolved predator, does he keep it in the house?'”

In his best-selling book on the science of emotions, Emotional Ignorance, the neuroscientist talks about his five-year-old cat Pickle, saying that cats and dogs share many of the same traits as human infants. . He explained that humans are evolutionarily programmed to pour their emotions into babies so that adults don’t abandon them after birth.

However, the urge to care for them has inadvertently “rippled over” our pets. Dr. Barnett said: “Dogs and cats are small, have big heads and eyes, can’t talk, and play a lot, but they are very dependent on us. These characteristics are the same as those of babies, so we is emotionally sensitive and wants to protect it.”

A 2014 study by researchers affiliated with Harvard University found that mothers’ brains lit up as well when they saw pictures of their children and dogs, suggesting the same emotions.