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Doctors Researching Bond Between Pets, Pet Owners

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Can anything compare to the love a parent has for their child? Some dog owners say they love their pet like a baby and as CBS2's Dana Tyler reported, doctors are now testing just how deep those bonds are.

Mothers at one puppy training class admit they feel a real connection with their four-legged family members.

"I think you have a real bond with your dog the way you do with your kids," Brook Muir said.

Veterinarian Lori Palley set out to test that theory by getting an up close look inside the brains of human mothers.

"We decided actually to pursue this study in order to understand the human-animal bond better," she said. "Why we consider them family members and try to begin to understand that."

In one study, moms of young children had their brains scanned in an MRI machine while shown pictures of their child, then their dog.

"Yes there were some similarities, without a doubt," Palley said.

In the MRI, researchers saw many of the same areas of the brain light up, but there were some important differences too.

"Here you see all this yellow, but you don't see it when mothers view images of their own dog. This is the area we speculate is critical to human-human bond formation," Palley said.

Dr. Palley stresses this is a small study, but it seems to support an actual biological connection to our dogs.

"What I think people are seeing, is that oh my god there is something in the brain going on. It's not just people self-reporting that I love my dog and it's like my child," Palley said.

"They are just there to love you which is wonderful," Muir said.

"And I can honestly say that I feel so much more special about Katie than my children, which they are going to have a bird about," Ellen Cagno said.

The science may now be catching up with what some moms already know.

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