Man’s best friend is surprisingly skilled at getting inside your head.

By Alexandra Horowitz, September 16, 2022

Quid and I have struck a deal. Every morning she flies up the stairs, leaps onto our bed, and attacks my nose with her sharp little teeth. And I am awakened.

Oh wait, no; we don’t have a deal. She just does that. It is vexing and charming at once. Just at the moment of nose-attack I can smell the sleep collected on her breath and fur. It mingles with the odor of the other dogs in the room and is beginning to smell, to me, like home. It has been six months since she left her natal litter of 10 siblings and joined our family of three humans, two dogs, and one cat.

And it has been a few months since she went from being a very young puppy to an adolescent, her brain trailing her body in development. Recently, she has become more interested in contact of any sort with us. She minds where we are, beating a hasty path after us if we rise from a chair to leave the room, sometimes licking our ankles as we go. She lies next to me on the couch, her body contorted to maximize body-to-body contact.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/what-dogs-know-about-people/671454/