Complex social life has been proposed as one of the main driving forces in the evolution of higher cognitive abilities in humans and non-human animals ( Humphrey, 1976 Dunbar, 1998). First, an enduring topic of animal behavior and animal cognition research is how animals adapt to their social environment, how they cope with the challenges of dynamic relationships among group members, and especially how they achieve a balance between competition and cooperation. The question of how dogs perceive us humans is important for several reasons, both from the perspective of biologists as well as animal ethicists. It is our aim to thereby identify ethical dimensions of the human–dog relationship that have been overlooked so far. This allows us to analyze the human–dog relationship by applying an interdisciplinary approach that starts from the perspective of the dog to ultimately inform the perspective of humans. We will therefore set our discussion about the nature and ethical dimensions of the human–dog relationship against the background of the current empirical knowledge on dog (social) cognition. But how does this relationship look from the dogs’ perspective? How do they perceive the humans they engage with? What responsibilities and duties arise from the kind of mutual understanding, attachment, and the supposedly “special” bonds we form with them? Are there ethical implications, maybe even ethical implications beyond animal welfare? The past decades have seen an upsurge of research from comparative cognition on pet dogs’ cognitive and social skills, especially in comparison with and reference to humans. Relationships with pet dogs are both very widespread and very intense, often leading to strong attachments between owners or caregivers and animals and to a treatment of these dogs as family members or even children. Like no other species they exemplify the role of companion animals. Dogs have been part of human societies for longer than any other domestic species. This holds, despite the fact that we like to think about our dogs as human’s best friend. In this sense, the human-animal relationship is nothing we should romanticize: it comes with clear power relations and thus with a set of responsibilities on the side of those who exercise this power. This also means that animals, like those dogs we commonly refer to as our pets, are living in a “human’s world” in the sense that it is us, not them, who, to a large degree, define and manage the interactions we have with them. We are indeed living in an “animal”s world,’ in the sense that our lives are very much intertwined with the lives of animals. Humans interact with animals in numerous ways and on numerous levels.
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