This is our youngest son, Murphy...

If you've always treated your dog like a little furry person, you aren't alone. Not only that, but as a new study reveals, you were probably right to do so.
A recent article on MSNBC previews a new paper by Jozsef Topal, one of the world's leading canine researchers, which argues that the thousands of years of shared environment between man and dog has made the dog a closer model to human behavior than chimpanzees with whom we share 98% of our genes.
"In my view, pet dogs can be regarded in many aspects as 'pre-verbal infants in canine's clothing'" said Topal. The dogs in his study performed at levels equal to a 16-month old child in a series of tests and the article notes that "dogs exhibit all three primary types of social behavior that humans evolved when they split from chimpanzees 6 million years ago".