What are dogs thinking?

The enthusiasm is partly built in. Mutual eye contact between a dog and its owner raises oxytocin in both of them - a feedback loop that does not happen between wolves and people, and one of the clearer signs of what domestication actually changed.

They also read us better than almost anything else does. Dogs follow human pointing without training, which chimpanzees largely fail at, and puppies manage it before they have had much human contact at all.