Why Your Dog Knows Your AC Is Broken Before You Do

There is an old man in Hennessey who lives with a yellow lab named Gus. His wife passed in 2020. Same house since 1979. When I went out there for a no-heat call, the dog sat at his feet the whole time, and the man talked to me and talked to Gus in the exact same tone.

When I finished the ticket, he said, Gus has gotten me through. That sentence landed. Most people who do not own dogs do not know what dogs actually do for the people who own them. In 2015 Miho Nagasawa showed in the journal Science that when a person and a dog hold eye contact, both get an oxytocin boost, the same hormone that bonds a mother to an infant. It is not metaphor. It is the same machinery.

This is me, on a service call near Kingfisher, talking about the quietest kind of company a person can keep, and why I notice it.

Core line: "The dog was the other person in the conversation."

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

When you think about it, um, being an HBAC technician, you know, someone who fixes broken furnaces or AC units is basically being an amateur anthropologist.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Oh, absolutely. It really is.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Right. Because you get called out to solve like a mechanical problem. But the moment you step over the threshold of a stranger's house, you're getting this front row seat to the raw, unfiltered reality of human survival. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Yeah. You really become an observer in the hidden ecosystem of someone's whole life.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Aaron Ross Powell Exactly. For an hour or two, you see the stress, the dynamics, the coping mechanisms, all of it just playing out behind closed doors.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Aaron Powell It's a profound vantage point. I mean, one that most of us just never get to experience. Yeah. Because an HVAC tech is looking at the physical mechanics of the house to see, you know, why the heat isn't working. But they inevitably end up witnessing the psychological mechanics of the household too.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Aaron Powell Seeing how the people inside are actually keeping themselves warm.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Precisely.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Well, today's deep dive is anchored by a really specific story from a guy who has been making those exact observations for uh 45 years.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Wow, 45 years.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Yeah. His name is Dave Hartzell. He's a master HVAC technician based out in Kingfisher, Oklahoma. And back in November of 2023, Dave gets a pretty standard no-heat service call.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Okay, standard winter stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Right. So he drives out to a house in a nearby town called Hennessy. And, you know, to really understand what we're going to unpack today, we have to set the scene for you.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Aaron Powell Because the environment is crucial. It tells the story before anyone even opens their mouth.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Exactly. So Dave walks into this house that is um exceptionally clean but heavily worn. The customer is a man in his late 70s.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

And he was widowed in 2020, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:44

He was. So he's been navigating the space entirely alone for three years. And he's lived in this exact same house since 1979.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Oh wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

So we are talking about like high traffic carpet from the early 90s, wallpaper from a decade before that.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Aaron Powell The kind of house that's just frozen in time.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

Totally. The kitchen counter is a remnant from a remodel they scraped together for their daughter's wedding back in 1998. The whole house is just a time capsule of a life that has largely already happened.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Aaron Ross Powell And navigating that time capsule alongside this old man is the actual star of today's deep dive.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Aaron Ross Powell Yes. A dog named Gus.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Gus.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Gus is an 11-year-old yellow lab. He is completely white around the muzzle, moving with that stiff, you know, careful gait of an older large breed.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Yeah, that classic senior dog waddle.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

Right. But Dave notes that Gus follows this man from the kitchen to the living room to the hallway, like the old man has a piece of bacon permanently stuffed in his pocket.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Like there's an invisible tether between them.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

You know, the detail that really caught my attention in Dave's account was the auditory environment.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Oh, how he talked to him.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Yeah. So while Dave has his tools out, working on the furnace, the man is sitting in his recliner, and Gus just sits heavily on the carpet right at his feet. The man strikes up a conversation with Dave, and then he seamlessly turns his head and talks to Gus. And then he looks back and talks to Dave.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

And he doesn't change his voice at all.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

He never switches his vocal register. There is absolutely none of that high-pitched sing song baby talk. He treats the dog as a full equal participant in the room.

SPEAKER_01 3:19

I love that. Gus wasn't just acting as a pet in the like traditional decorative sense. He was a roommate. He was a partner.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Right.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

And when Dave is packing up his tools and writing out the final service ticket, the man looks at him and delivers this sentence that really anchors everything we're exploring today.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

It's a powerful quote.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

He says, casually, but with just absolute conviction, Gus has gotten me through.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Yeah. And that phrase gotten me through is something we hear so often regarding animals that we tend to mentally file it away as just, you know, a sentimental metaphor. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Like we assume the person just means the dog provided a nice distraction.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Aaron Powell Exactly. Or a bit of fuzzy comfort during a tough time.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

Aaron Powell But the mission of our deep dive today is to strip away that metaphor entirely. We want to dig into the specific, hard science behind that exact sentence for you.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Because it's not poetry.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

No. We want to unpack the literal neurology and psychology of what a dog actually does for a human being in crisis. Because if you look at the research, that old man in Hennessy was stating a biological fact.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

Absolutely. So let's start with the biology of connection. There's a 2015 paper published in the journal Science by a researcher named Mio Nagasawa and her team in Japan.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

They wanted to understand the chemical mechanics of what happens when a human and a dog simply look at each other.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Because the prevailing thought back then was that dogs just learned to stare at us to beg for food. Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Right, that it was purely transactional. But Nagasawa wanted to test if there was something deeper occurring in the endocrine system.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

I remember reading about this. The laboratory setup itself is just fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

It really is.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

They brought dogs and their owners into a room, observed them interacting for 30 minutes, and just tracked the amount of time they spent in mutual eye contact.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

But they weren't just observing behavior.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

No, they were taking urine samples from both the humans and the dogs before and after the interaction.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Yeah, they were looking for a very specific neuropeptide called oxytocin.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Okay, oxytocin.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

And oxytocin is often reduced in pop science to the cuddled chemical. But its mechanical function in the body is incredibly powerful.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

What does it actually do mechanically?

SPEAKER_00 5:28

Well, when oxytocin floods the brain, it actively suppresses the amygdala, which is your brain's fear and stress center.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

It lowers your heart rate. It significantly drops your levels of cortisol, the primary stress hormone. And Nugasau's team discovered that when a human and a dog hold mutual eye contact, both of them experience a massive reciprocal spike in oxytocin.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

Wait, let me pause you there. I want to make sure I understand the gravity of this. Oxytocin is the exact same hormone responsible for human pair bonding, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 5:58

It is identical.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Like it's the chemical software that fires when a mother is nursing a newborn infant.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Yes. The biological machinery running between the old man in that 1979 house and his yellow lab is the exact same evolutionary machinery that bonds a human mother to her child.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

That is wild.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

The dog's gaze triggers the release of oxytocin in the human, which makes the human behave more affectionately, which in turn triggers a massive release of oxytocin in the dog's brain.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

So it feeds itself.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

Exactly. Nagasawa proved it is a closed, self-sustaining biochemical loop.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

Okay, this is where I have to push back a little, or at least, you know, play devil's advocate for the listener here.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

Culturally, we look at people pushing a Pomeranian in a baby stroller or referring to their golden retriever as their fur baby, and the default societal reaction is usually an eye roll.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

Oh, totally. A lot of judgment there.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Right. We assume they're just projecting human characteristics onto an animal that really just wants a treat. Are you saying the science proves they aren't projecting at all?

SPEAKER_00 7:02

They really are.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

That the brain of the dog and the brain of the human are literally speaking the chemical language of parent and child.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

The science is unequivocal on this. They're running the exact same software. But here is the detail that elevates this from a neat scientific fact to like an evolutionary miracle. Okay, I'm ready. Nagasawa's team ran the exact same gaze experiment using wolves. Wolves. Yeah, but not wild wolves. They used wolves that had been hand-raised by humans from birth. They were bottle fed, completely socialized, and living alongside human caretakers.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

So these wolves had every environmental reason to bond with humans just like a dog would.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Exactly. Yet the oxytocin loop did not happen.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

Right, really.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

Zero mutual spike. In fact, wolves actively avert their gaze from humans because in the wild, prolonged eye contact is a sign of aggression or a challenge for dominance.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Oh, right. Because staring is a threat.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Right. So at some point in the last 30,000 years, dogs mutated. They completely rewired their own instinctual programming.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

They took a behavior that meant I'm going to attack you and somehow hacked into the human maternal bonding system.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Oh. Turning that gaze into a biological hug. It is an exclusive cross-species chemical channel that exists only between us and them.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

That is staggering when you think about the application. So when that man in Hennessy is sitting in his recliner, completely overwhelmed by the grief of losing his wife, and he looks down at Gus, that isn't just a moment of quiet companionship. No, not at all. Gus is essentially administering a biological intervention. The dog is looking at him and actively lowering the cortisol levels in the man's bloodstream.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

It is a chemical intervention, yes. But a chemical spark alone isn't enough to sustain a person through years of profound grief.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Right, because you can't just stare at a dog 24-7.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Exactly. And that brings us to how this neurochemistry translates into daily functional psychology. How does oxytocin actually get a grieving widower out of bed in the morning when the house is entirely silent?

SPEAKER_01 9:08

That's the real question. Because grief, especially if you're losing a spouse of 40 years, is a state of severe neurological dysregulation.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

Yeah, your brain completely loses its anchor.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

So how does the dog transition from a chemical trigger to a psychological anchor?

SPEAKER_00 9:22

To answer that, we look at the work of researcher John Archer, who published a foundational paper in 1997 on the evolution of human animal bonds. Archer examined the criteria psychologists use to define a human attachment figure. Things like seeking proximity to them for comfort, using them as a safe haven during distress, and experiencing separation anxiety when they're gone.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

Like the way a toddler acts with the parent.

SPEAKER_00 9:45

Exactly. And Archer's research established that pets activate the human attachment system in ways that are functionally identical to human relationships. The dog isn't just a pet, the dog is a literal attachment figure.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Meaning the human brain relies on the animal for basic psychological security in the same way it relies on a best friend or spouse.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

Yes. And because Gus acts as a true attachment figure, he is able to provide something crucial called co-regulation.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Co-regulation.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

Right. When a human being suffers a catastrophic loss, their nervous system becomes chaotic. They stop eating regularly, they sleep at strange hours. They completely lose their temporal grounding.

SPEAKER_01 10:25

They lose the rhythm of their life. Which makes perfect sense because for decades that man's rhythm was co-authored by his wife. When to wake up, when to have coffee, when to turn off the lights. When she passed away, the author of that rhythm just disappeared.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

But Gus remained. Think about what a dog physically requires from a household.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

A lot of work.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

Yeah. Gus forces a very specific, undeniable rhythm onto the environment. Feed time is at 7 a.m. Walk time is at 10 a.m. bedtime is at 9.0 p.m.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

And that structure is not optional.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Not at all. The dog cannot open the fridge.

SPEAKER_01 11:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

The dog cannot unlock the back door. The dog will literally stand in the center of the kitchen and demand that the routine be honored.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

I love this framing. It's like the dog is a biological metronome.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Oh, that's a great way to put it.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Because when a person's life completely shatters, their internal sense of time and purpose just stops ticking. But the dog's absolute undeniable need for survival forces the human's nervous system to just keep keeping time.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

Tick-tock. Feed me, walk me, let me out.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Biological metronome is an incredibly accurate analogy. By enforcing that routine, the dog co-regulates the human. The widower has a mandatory reason to walk into the kitchen every single morning. He gets up earlier, he physically touches another living creature, he speaks out loud, exercising his vocal cords, even if he's just telling Gus it's raining outside.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

So the routine keeps the machinery of the man's life from just rusting shut.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

It does.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

But we do need to be careful here, and I want to make sure we're presenting this impartially. As incredible as this co-regulation is, a dog does not actually solve the problem of human isolation, do they?

SPEAKER_00 12:04

They absolutely do not. And we cannot romanticize the science to suggest that a dog is a one-to-one replacement for human connection. Gus does not fill the human gap.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

And Dave Hartzell observed this very clearly during his service call.

SPEAKER_00 12:18

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

He noted that the old man hadn't had a meaningful, sustained conversation with another human adult in days. While Dave was taking apart the furnace blower, the man was essentially unloading a week's worth of accumulated thoughts onto him.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

Just craving that interaction.

SPEAKER_01 12:33

Yeah, he was talking about the weather, local politics, memories of his wife, the price of groceries. He was starved for the specific, nuanced feedback that only another human can provide.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

That is a crucial caveat. The dog cannot offer intellectual reciprocity. The dog cannot share a memory of the man's late wife. There is no biological substitute for that human gap. Right. But what Gus is doing is keeping the underlying psychological system functional enough so that the man can survive the gap until a guy like Dave shows up to fix the furnace.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

Which makes the bond between them incredibly profound. It's a literal lifeline.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

It really is.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

But logically, that sets up a deeply devastating reality.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

Yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

If this bond is biologically real, if the oxytocin loop is real and the attachment theory is real and the co-regulation is real, then the impending loss of that animal is going to be a severe psychological trauma.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Aaron Powell You can't hack the nervous system without paying a toll when the connection breaks.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

Right. The cost is inescapable.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Because the attachment is legitimate, the grief will be entirely legitimate. And Dave Hartzall actually witnessed the leading edge of this toll.

SPEAKER_01 13:39

Aaron Powell This brings us to Dave's follow-up visit.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

It's roughly a year later, November of 2024. Dave is back at the house in Hennessy, this time doing a routine check on the air conditioning unit before winter fully sets in.

SPEAKER_00 13:53

And Gus is 13 now.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Yes, Gus is 13. And the physical environment of the house has adapted to a new reality. Gus is sleeping much more heavily, and crucially, he can no longer manage the two steps leading up to the back porch.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

So what does the owner do?

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Well, the old man has gone out, bought materials, and built a custom flywood ramp right over the steps.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

The plywood ramp is such a brilliant piece of behavioral evidence. It is a physical manifestation of an owner attempting to artificially extend an environment that is failing.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Yeah, he's building infrastructure for his dog.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

And while Dave is checking the Freon levels, the man asks him a question. He asks, How long do dogs usually live?

SPEAKER_01 14:32

And Dave doesn't sugarcoat it, does he?

SPEAKER_00 14:34

No. He tells him the truth. For a yellow lab, it's usually 12 to 14 years, sometimes a little longer if you're lucky.

SPEAKER_01 14:39

Dave noted that the man didn't react with any sudden shock or like dramatic emotion. He just processed it like a heavy fact he'd been quietly turning over in his head for weeks. He looked at the dog and said, I think we are getting close. And then he looked at Dave and said, When Gus is gone, I'm gonna be in trouble for a while.

SPEAKER_00 15:00

I am gonna be in trouble for a while. It is an intensely self-aware statement.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

It really is.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Remember, this man had already survived the prolonged loss of his wife. He knows exactly what the architecture of grief looks like, and he is looking at Gus and seeing the exact same storm forming on the horizon.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

He knows what's coming.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

What this man is experiencing on that porch is a psychological phenomenon outlined by researcher and psychologist Pauline Boss. She termed it anticipatory grief.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Can you break down the mechanics of anticipatory grief? Is it just the act of feeling sad before an event happens, or is the brain actually doing something different?

SPEAKER_00 15:36

It's much deeper than just feeling sad. It is the nervous system preemptively trying to survive the severing of an attachment bond.

SPEAKER_01 15:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

Your brain knows the co-regulator is failing. When the man watches Gus struggle to walk up that plywood ramp, his brain is actively mapping out what the house will feel like when the ramp is empty. Wow. Grieving in advance of a known loss does its structural work on your psyche, whether you actively acknowledge it or not. The clinical research community has a very specific term for this level of bereavement. They call it an attachment grade loss.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

An attachment grade loss. Okay, I have a massive question about this, looking at it through a cultural lens.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

Go for it.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

If the science is this absolute, if losing a dog is legitimately an attachment grade loss that rips away a person's primary biological coping mechanism, is our society actively harming people by treating pet loss as a secondary lesser grief? Yes. Because the common refrain is often, it's just a dog. You can always go to the shelter and get another one. By minimizing this, aren't we basically abandoning people at the precise neurological moment they need support the most?

SPEAKER_00 16:40

We are. That cultural minimization is incredibly destructive. When we tell someone it's just a dog, we are ignoring the biological reality of what that animal provided.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

We're basically gaslighting their nervous system.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

Exactly. We are essentially telling someone that the collapse of their daily routine, the loss of their primary source of oxytocin, and the severing of their co-regulation is just a hobby gone wrong.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

God, that's brutal.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

It forces the grieving person to swallow their trauma, which isolates them completely. It compounds the biological stress with social shame.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

So bringing all of this together, the oxytocin loop, the biological metronome of routine, the reality of attachment grade loss. How does this deep dive actually change the way you, the listener, operate in your daily life?

SPEAKER_00 17:30

How do we use this science?

SPEAKER_01 17:31

Yeah, how do we use it?

SPEAKER_00 17:32

If you are listening to this and you have a dog, the most immediate takeaway is to permanently validate your own experience.

SPEAKER_01 17:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:38

Your bond is rooted in hard biology. It is not an illusion.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

You're not crazy.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

You are not weak or overly sentimental for talking to your dog as an equal. You are not strange for feeling a deep preemptive ache when you notice them slowing down on walks. Right. That mutual gaze you share is doing real, measurable, therapeutic work in your nervous system.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

And what if you are on the outside of the equation? What if you are the friend, the neighbor, or the coworker of someone who is watching their dog fail or who has just lost a pet?

SPEAKER_00 18:09

You must treat it exactly as the neurological research defines it. An attachment grade loss. Do not minimize it.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Don't tell them it's just a dog.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Exactly. Do not tell them they should distract themselves by taking a cooking class or getting out of the house more. Show up for them the exact same way you would if they had lost a human partner because their nervous system is actively mourning a partner.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

And I think the perfect blueprint for how to show up is actually right there in Dave Hartzell's original story. Oh, totally. Notice what Dave did not do. He didn't offer the old man any hollow platitudes. He didn't try to fix the man's loneliness with unsolicited advice.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

Dave offered the most powerful support available, a complete non-judgmental acknowledgement of reality.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Exactly. Or rather, he just witnessed it. He treated Gus like a legitimate, vital member of the household.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

He used the dog's name.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

Yes. He didn't step over Gus like a piece of moving furniture. He listened to the old man's state of frightening truth. I'm gonna be in trouble for a while. And he didn't try to talk him out of it.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

He just let the truth hang there.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

He validated the impending loss. He made sure the physical house had heat, and he left. Sometimes just adopting the mindset of an amateur anthropologist, simply witnessing someone's reality and honoring it without trying to fix it, is the absolute best support you can offer.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

The simple act of looking at someone and saying, through your actions, I see that this bond is real and I see that your fear of losing it is valid, can do wonders for a dysregulated nervous system.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

It really can. And, you know, before we wrap up today's deep dive, I want to leave you with one final lingering thought to explore on your own. We've spent this time unraveling this incredible oxytocin loop, this biological metronome that humans and dogs have miraculously co-evolved to share. If the human nervous system has evolved to run this profound, life-saving, co-regulating software with a completely different species, what does that actually reveal about the sheer expansiveness of human empathy?

SPEAKER_00 20:09

Oh, that's a big question.

SPEAKER_01 20:11

Could we theoretically learn to run this same biological bonding loop with other facets of the natural world?

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Like other animals or environments.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Yeah. Is the architecture of our brain capable of extending that deep chemical connection to other animals, or perhaps even to the environments we live in? Or is the dog a strictly singular, irreplicable miracle of evolution that we were just incredibly lucky to stumble into 30,000 years ago?

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Wow. That's definitely something that you want.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

It's something to ponder. So the next time you see someone sitting quietly, looking deeply into their older dog's eyes, or you spot a makeshift piece of plywood serving as a ramp over a port step, remember Dave Harksell out in Kingfisher, Oklahoma.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

Remember Gus.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

But you aren't just looking at a pet owner. You are looking at a biological lifeline holding a human being together.