Our pets really do love us:
Bottom Line: Here's a little feel-good research for your Wednesday. Your dog not only loves you. He potentially loves you even more than food!
Emory University just completed first of its kind research to prove your dog's true devotion to you. 90 dogs were part of a multi-month study using the brain activity of dogs to measure the responses to praise and food over an extended period of time. It turned out that at a minimum the reaction to the food and the praise was at least equal always. 20% of the dogs actually responded more favorably to the praise than the food (hot dogs were the food used for the research btw).
While the test was conducted specifically on dogs, based on the brain composition of other animals the same may very well be true of other animals as well.