Puppies are literally born to be our best friends, study finds. Here’s why

Not unlike babies, puppies are born with some innate, hardwired skills to communicate with people before they’re ever trained, according to a new study, and they’re just as cute (well, depending on who you ask.)

Turns out genetics can explain more than 40% of the discrepancy in how tested puppies performed on social tasks, such as responding to pointing gestures and maintaining eye contact with people, than others.

But while puppies may literally be born to be our best friends, the study showed they may need some time to develop the ability to initiate communication with people on their own — again, kind of like babies (beware: the “terrible twos” aren’t just for toddlers.)

University of Arizona researchers didn’t just want to play with fluffy puppies all day; they say now they can focus on finding the specific genes responsible for these social traits that can help identify dogs that would be good service animals before they are even born. The study was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

“People have been interested in dogs’ abilities to do these kinds of things for a long time, but there’s always been debate about to what extent is this really in the biology of dogs, versus something they learn by palling around with humans,” study co-author Evan MacLean, an assistant professor of anthropology and director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. “We found that there’s definitely a strong genetic component, and they’re definitely doing it from the get-go.”

The team experimented with 375 8-week-old puppies from Canine Companions, a California-based service dog organization. The puppies had little one-on-one interaction with people prior to the study, ruling out the possibility that observed behaviors were learned.

The puppies were then put up to four different tasks, two of which involved finding treats inside overturned cups using human-initiated social cues like finger pointing and object placement, rather than their noses. The other two tested the puppies’ ability to make eye contact with people and initiate communication to get what they wanted — the treat.

The last experiment was designed to see if the puppies would use eye contact to get the human to open a container that had a sealed treat inside, but the researchers learned the canines couldn’t initiate that connection.

And genetics can potentially explain why.

“If you think about language learning, children can understand what we’re saying to them before they can physically produce the words,” study lead study author Emily Bray, a postdoctoral research associate in the University of Arizona School of Anthropology, said in the statement. “It’s potentially a similar story with puppies; they are understanding what is being socially conveyed to them, but the production of it on their end is probably going to take a little bit longer, developmentally.”