Your dog can understand you better than you think

Many dog owners have long believed their pets understand not only what they say, but how they feel.

Finally, the science to back us crazy dog lovers up has been revealed, and it turns out we’ve been right all along.

A new Hungarian study found canines’ brains process words and how we say them (intonation) the same way humans do.

Researchers from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest studied magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of dogs and discovered they’re more like us than we ever imagined.

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13 family dogs, including border collies, golden retrievers and German shepherds, learned to lie still for seven minutes so they could go through the MRI machine to be scanned.

Their brains were monitored while the dogs listened to their trainer’s voice via headphones.

Scientists were surprised to find that pooches process words with the left side of their brains and analyse pitch with their right side, exactly like humans.

The scans also revealed their reward centres would light up when they were praised but only if both the word meaning and intonation match and confirmed that dogs can separately process and combine what we say and how we say it.

Knowing that dogs are able to make sense of what we are saying, means languages are no longer uniquely human and can in fact be understood by our furry friends too.

So when you next talk to your dog, you can be sure they're listening keenly to everything you say.

They're not called man's best friend for nothing!

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