Like dog, like owner: our animals are really (physically and psychologically) the same as us

If you know people who look strangely similar to your own pets, you’re not hallucinating: it’s really true — and several studies have already proven it.

Not only do people and their pets look and act alike, but these similarities between their personalities they also deepen over time, explains .

In a study published in 2015 in Anthrozoösparticipants were able to connect owners to their dogs just looking into each other’s eyes.

Another published the same year in the same magazine found that women often had hair similar in length to your dog’s ears.

Now, one that brings together a analysis of 15 other studies shows that not only do animals physically resemble their owners, but their personalities also resemble each other.

The study also provides different theories to explain why this situation occurs frequently.

One such theory suggests that owners may first feel more attracted to dogs that are like themand as they age together, the two species can regulate each other’s emotionsreinforce each other’s behavior or even learn together.

“It’s similar to how we also look for our partners”the leader of the study published in Personality and Individual Differences, It’s Bender, researcher at the DogStudies Group at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, in Germany.

According to the researcher, dogs and their owners share “a very close relationship… comparable to many human relationships.”

While about a third of a dog’s personality is genetic, another two-thirds are determined by your environmentwhich is largely shaped by the owner, if they have been together since childhood, also explains the researcher at the ELTE Faculty of Sciences, in Hungary, Borbála Turcsa.

“It’s the same as the child-mother bond, but dogs form it for humans. This is the basis of all social relationships between dogs and humans”, explains the researcher: dogs “blindly trust that their owners know more” than they do.

Give an example: “if a truck comes and makes a lot of noise, the dog will look at its owner. If If the owner doesn’t care, the dog will learn not to care“, she says.

The study had, however, some limitationsfrom the fact that the dogs studied were few and mostly purebred, to the fact that evaluating the personality of dogs is a complicated task and partly done only through the owners, who spend more time with them.

Still, it is true that dogs adopt behaviors from their owners — and vice versa. And it seems that, physically, We are very friendly with our pets. For better or worse.