A new study of identical twins suggests that genetics helps determine whether someone will be a dog lover or not.
Those of us who love dogs don't often think very much about why we love them, and why others don't. They simply know that being around dogs makes them happy. Some scientists think that there may be a deeper explanation. In 2019 a team of Swedish and British scientists published a study claiming that whether we chose to own a dog may be influenced by our genes.
The study was based on a database of twins maintained by the Swedish government. There are two kinds of twins. Identical twins have all of the same genes. Fraternal twins are no more genetically similar than other siblings, but usually grow up in the same environment. The researchers used this difference to tease apart environmental from genetic influences on dog ownership.
They combined the data on twins with data on dog ownership also obtained from Swedish national registries, and studied dog ownership in more than 35,000 twin pairs.
If identical twins are more likely than fraternal twins to both own dogs, that would be evidence for a genetic influence on dog ownership over and above influences from the twins' shared upbringing.
Using this reasoning, the researchers' analysis showed that there was, indeed, a significant genetic influence on dog ownership that was stronger in women than in men.
This new finding might be able to tell us something about how the partnership between humans and dogs evolved.
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