Suzanne Morphew, 49, was reported missing from her Colorado home on Mother’s Day 2020. Her disappearance prompted a nationwide search and a lengthy investigation.
A Strained Marriage and a Missing Wife
In 2018, Barry and Suzanne Morphew moved to a large home just outside Salida, a small town in Chaffee County, Colorado. They told friends they had relocated to be closer to their older daughter, Mallory, who was in college.
Their younger daughter, Macy, was 16 and lived at home. Barry, an avid hunter, ran a landscaping business with a crew of workers, and the couple remained little known in Salida, having lived there only a couple of years.
Cody Cox, who worked on Barry’s crew for nearly two years, said he often heard Barry talking with Suzanne as they drove in Barry’s truck and that the two seemed to communicate well.
There were rumblings about the state of the marriage. Some who knew the couple hoped that a new home and new surroundings would strengthen their bond, but the relationship did not appear to improve.
Suzanne’s sister, Melinda Moorman, described Barry as dominant in the relationship and said he tended to overpower and intimidate people to get what he wanted.
Two days before Suzanne disappeared, she sent Melinda a lengthy text message filled with anger toward Barry. In part, it read: “He’s also been abusive emotionally and physically. I feel more angry now. Anger at what I’ve allowed.”
After Suzanne was reported missing, Barry gave investigators an account of Saturday, May 9, 2020. He said he arrived home at about 3 p.m. and spent a pleasant evening with Suzanne, and that the couple had dinner together, were intimate, and went to sleep.
When he left on Mother’s Day morning for a job site in Broomfield, a town near Denver about 150 miles from Salida, Suzanne was still asleep in their bed. It was the last time he saw her. Barry spoke with investigators almost every time they asked, and he repeated this account each time.
Mallory and Macy were away on a camping trip that weekend, and relatives told investigators it seemed odd that neither daughter was with her mother on Mother’s Day, since Suzanne had no other plans.
On Sunday, May 10, Barry texted Suzanne to wish her a happy Mother’s Day and received no reply. He was also in contact with his daughters, who told him they could not reach their mother either.
One of the daughters contacted a neighbor, who went to the house and found Suzanne’s car but no sign of Suzanne. The neighbor then contacted Barry, who suggested looking for Suzanne’s mountain bike. When the neighbor could not find it, Barry asked him to call 911, and the call was placed to report Suzanne missing.
Local law enforcement responded and found the bicycle at the bottom of a ravine near the house, resting on boulders beneath a small cliff.
Suzanne had only recently taken up mountain biking, so an accident seemed plausible, yet Suzanne herself was nowhere to be found. The first theory investigators considered was kidnapping, and the possibility that Suzanne had been abducted hit the peaceful, picturesque town of Salida hard.
A Nationwide Search for Suzanne
As officers worked at the ravine that first night, one saw a mountain lion walk past a car, which led to speculation that the animal had attacked Suzanne. Barry himself noted that an attack would have left blood and signs of a struggle, and the theory was quickly dropped.
No sign of Suzanne was found near the bicycle, and investigators came to believe the scene had been staged. Days later, Suzanne’s helmet was found roughly a mile away off Highway 50, on the south side of the road, and investigators considered whether it had been thrown from a vehicle.
Her sunglasses and hydration backpack, a pack used to carry water on rides, were found inside her Range Rover, along with her driver’s license and credit cards. Her cell phone was missing. These discoveries led authorities to doubt that Suzanne had gone for a bike ride at all.
As the search widened, Barry made a public appeal to anyone who might be holding his wife. “Oh, Suzanne, if anyone is out there that can hear this that has you, we’ll do whatever it takes to bring you back,” he said.
Search teams combed the terrain around the home, and boats were brought in to search local waterways. Barry offered a $100,000 reward for information, no questions asked, which was later doubled to $200,000. The large Morphew home was sealed off while investigators searched it, along with the family’s cars and trucks.
As investigators began trying to verify Barry’s account of the weekend, they were pulled in a new direction. About 10 days into the investigation, they learned of a device that had been hidden in the master bedroom of the Morphew home.
It was a spy pen, an ordinary-looking pen that secretly recorded conversations. It had been given to Suzanne so that she could record Barry, in hopes of catching him in an affair. Instead, it had captured a conversation between Suzanne and a man named Jeff, and the recording made clear that Jeff was her lover.
In the weeks and months that followed, the trail went cold, even as the disappearance became the biggest story in Colorado. Four months into the search, Suzanne’s brother, Andrew Moorman, organized a citizen search.
He said he had hoped to find her alive, but he recognized that the chances of that diminished dramatically as time passed. Throughout, investigators still had not identified the man on the recording.
The Man Named Jeff
Suzanne had hidden the relationship so carefully that it took agents six months to identify him. He was Jeff Libler, who lived in Michigan with his wife and six children. He and Suzanne had shared a one-time fling after high school.
Decades passed before Suzanne contacted him again, in 2018, when she sent him a Facebook message after moving to Colorado. It read, “Howdy, Stranger.” From then on, the two talked almost every day.
Libler stayed silent in the months after Suzanne vanished. He deleted every social media account he had used to communicate with her, hiding the nearly two-year affair, and he began cooperating only after investigators located him.
He told agents he had taken those steps because he did not want to tarnish Suzanne’s memory and feared losing his family and his job. He also asked the agents whether he was a target. Libler agreed to provide his DNA, his phone records, and the passwords to his deleted accounts.
Through the couple’s iCloud accounts and phone records, investigators pieced together the relationship. On several occasions, Suzanne had gone on vacation to meet Libler in states ranging from Louisiana to Florida.
The two had exchanged intimate photos, talked of becoming husband and wife, and discussed leaving the United States, including a plan to move to Ecuador at one point. When investigators told Barry about the affair, he denied knowing anything about it.
A deleted text found on his phone, sent by Suzanne just days before she vanished, read: “I’m done. I could care less what you’re up to and have been for years. We just need to figure this out civilly.”
The affair became a key part of the investigation as agents tried to determine what happened to Suzanne on Saturday, May 9. The records showed that she and Libler exchanged 59 messages that day, far more than usual.
At one point, Suzanne sent Libler a selfie, which investigators called her last proof-of-life photo. Barry was not home as the messages grew more affectionate. At 2:05 p.m., Suzanne wrote that she was in love with Libler and asked what he was doing.
He replied a minute later with a flirtatious message, and Suzanne said she would load up WhatsApp. At 2:11 p.m., she wrote that she was on the app. That was the last message she is known to have sent.
At 2:26 p.m., she received a text from Barry: “Done. Headed back.” She did not respond. Barry followed up by asking, “Did you leave?” and again received no answer.
Libler told agents he had been in Michigan that weekend, and his alibi checked out. He was cleared as a suspect.
Data From a Phone and a Truck
With Libler cleared, investigators turned to what the records from Barry’s phone and truck showed about May 9. Authorities came to believe that Barry killed Suzanne that afternoon, knowing that their daughters would be away on the camping trip.
They noted that Barry returned home soon after sending his last text, because his cell phone began pinging at various spots around the outside of his house. When asked to explain, Barry said he had probably been walking around the property shooting chipmunks, which he described as a constant nuisance.
Investigators found no evidence of chipmunk shootings around the home. Barry gave between 30 and 40 interviews in all, to people ranging from a county detective to members of the FBI, and he did so without a lawyer present.
At 2:47 p.m., Barry’s phone went into airplane mode and it stayed that way until 10:17 p.m., a span of nearly eight hours. Authorities believed he spent that time disposing of possible evidence.
With the phone untraceable, investigators turned to the data stored in the computers of Barry’s Ford truck. Specialists in this field can extract such records, which are used as evidence in court cases around the world.
The truck’s records differed from Barry’s account. He had told agents that he went to bed at about 8 p.m., set an alarm for 4:30 a.m., and left the house by 5 a.m., but the data showed that at about 9:30 p.m. the truck was put in reverse and moved roughly 96 feet closer to the house.
Investigators thought this could have been the moment Suzanne’s body was loaded. At about 3:30 a.m. on Mother’s Day, someone opened and closed the truck’s doors, which led investigators to believe Barry began driving toward Broomfield much earlier than he had said.
From about 4 a.m. to 8 a.m., the truck’s computers recorded nothing, because data of this kind can be overwritten over time.
Barry filled in part of that gap himself. He told agents that when he left home that morning, he turned left instead of right because he had spotted a herd of elk in the dark and wanted a closer look.
That put him in the area where Suzanne’s helmet had been recovered, and investigators believed he could have discarded it there.
At 8:10 a.m., the truck’s computers began recording again, and Barry’s phone had come back on. The data showed that his first stop was a bus stop in Broomfield, where he threw something into a garbage can.
He then visited a hotel trash can, a McDonald’s trash can, and a dumpster in a Men’s Wearhouse parking lot, before returning to the hotel to use its dumpster. Investigators believed he was disposing of evidence.
A surveillance image captured Barry at one of the stops but did not show what he discarded. Barry explained that he always had a lot of junk in his vehicle and did not like paying to dispose of it at a landfill.
After visiting the work site, Barry went to his room at a Holiday Inn, where he stayed from 12:42 p.m. until 6:03 p.m. On his way out, he dropped off tools, including a shovel, with coworkers and told them there was a family emergency.
He arranged hotel rooms for the crew, and one worker took over Barry’s room. That worker told investigators the room had a strong smell of chlorine or bleach. During the drive back to Salida, Barry spoke with sheriff’s deputies, who told him Suzanne’s bike had been found.
He arrived at the ravine at about 8:40 p.m. and was emotional for a few minutes. By Sunday night, the Morphews’ daughters were back home, but Suzanne was still missing.
Charges and a Court Battle
As weeks and months passed, Barry remained at the center of the investigation and became the prime suspect.
Investigators also uncovered many messages Suzanne had sent to a close friend that revealed her tormented feelings about Barry, including: “He won’t speak of divorce. I feel no peace when he’s here. I wouldn’t feel safe alone with him.”
During the search of the Morphew home, a forensics team found a clear plastic cap in the family’s dryer, which prosecutors believed came from a syringe used to fill a tranquilizer dart.
Investigators also found a tranquilizer rifle in a safe and packages of tranquilizer darts at the home, but no chemicals. Barry had told investigators he was an experienced tranquilizer dart shooter who knew how to load darts with paralyzing chemicals.
He said he had used them to sedate deer illegally and cut off their antlers to sell. “I shoot them. They go to sleep. I cut their horns off. It’s totally illegal,” he said. “But you’re going to find tran darts around my property because I’ve done that.”
An animal the size of a deer can take between 4 and 20 minutes to drop after being struck by a dart. An animal care equipment specialist said a person hit by such a dart could run but would not get far, and that the dart could be lethal to a human.
Prosecutors theorized that Barry’s phone had pinged around the house not because he was shooting chipmunks but because he was chasing Suzanne after shooting her with a dart.
Apparent scratches on Barry’s left arm were also cited as support for the idea that the two had a confrontation. Agents brought their evidence to the district attorney.
Barry was arrested in May 2021, close to the anniversary of Suzanne’s disappearance. A passerby captured the moment on a cell phone, and the Chaffee County sheriff announced the arrest.
Melinda Moorman responded that there were no winners in the story and that two families were suffering deeply. Barry was charged with first-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence, and other allegations, even though Suzanne’s body had not been found and prosecutors assumed she was dead.
He was held without bail and pleaded not guilty. The arrest affidavit stated that Barry could not control Suzanne’s insistence on leaving him and resorted to hunting and controlling her as he had hunted and controlled animals.
To fight the charges, Barry hired high-profile defense lawyers from Denver. In the summer of 2021, Judge Patrick Murphy heard the prosecution’s evidence in open court at a preliminary hearing.
The defense argued that the plastic cap meant nothing because no one could say how long it had been in the dryer, and Barry’s DNA was not found on it.
The defense also noted that a Holiday Inn manager had told agents the chlorine smell existed before Barry stayed there, because the room sat directly above an indoor pool.
The hearing also made public a DNA finding from the prosecution’s own forensic team. Agents had swabbed the inside of Suzanne’s Range Rover and found male DNA on the glove box.
It did not belong to Barry or to Libler. It was a partial match to an unidentified man connected to three unsolved sexual assault cases in Tempe, Phoenix, and Chicago. The defense could point to the finding as a sign that someone else was involved.
In September 2021, the judge heard arguments on whether the evidence was strong enough for a trial. He described three possibilities: that Suzanne left willingly, that Barry killed her, or that someone else abducted and killed her.
He considered it unlikely that she had left on her own, citing evidence of how loving she was toward her daughters and family. He also said, “I find that the proof is not evident, nor is the presumption great that Mr. Morphew committed first-degree murder.”
Even so, he ruled there was probable cause, the legal standard needed to send a case to trial, noting that he was viewing all the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution.
He set a $500,000 cash-only bond and Barry was fitted with an ankle monitor and required to stay in Chaffee County. On September 20, 2021, after months in jail, Barry walked out smiling alongside his daughters, who stood firmly behind him.
Barry’s trial was scheduled to begin on April 28, 2022. In the months before that date, Judge Murphy stepped aside, and Judge Ramsey Lama took over the case.
Defense attorney Iris Eytan filed motions asking that prosecutors be sanctioned, or penalized, for failing to share evidence on time, including potentially helpful material such as the male DNA found in the Range Rover.
She said DNA from unknown males had also been found on the bike, on the helmet, and inside the house. In April 2022, Judge Lama ruled that prosecutors had repeatedly missed deadlines and failed to turn over important information.
He did not find the actions willful, but he wrote that the pattern was “negligent, bordering on reckless.” As a penalty, he barred 14 prosecution witnesses from testifying, including experts in DNA, cell phone data, and vehicle data recovery.
On April 19, 2022, as a pretrial hearing was about to begin, District Attorney Linda Stanley filed a motion to dismiss the murder charges without prejudice, meaning they could be filed again.
The case had no body, no blood evidence of foul play, and no eyewitnesses, and she pointed to the court’s decision to bar the witnesses. “Without this crucial evidence and without the victim’s body, the people cannot move forward at this time in good faith,” the motion said.
Barry, his daughters, and his attorney had received no advance warning. The motion also stated that investigators were close to discovering where Suzanne’s body was located: a remote, mountainous region near the Morphew home that would be excavated after five feet of snow melted.
The judge granted the request, and Barry walked out of court a free man. Eytan denied that Barry had any involvement in his wife’s disappearance and said he loved and missed Suzanne and wanted to know where she was.
Melinda Moorman said she agreed with the dismissal for now and hoped that more time would allow searchers to find Suzanne’s body and win a solid conviction, which she said would dispel all rumors about Suzanne’s whereabouts.
The dismissal did not end Barry’s legal fight. In May 2023, he filed a federal lawsuit seeking $15 million from Chaffee County, the sheriff’s department, Stanley, and other investigators, alleging that they had fabricated evidence and withheld helpful evidence from the defense.
In September 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, saying prosecutors had acted badly but that authorities still had enough reason to arrest and charge him.
Meanwhile, in mid-September 2023, Suzanne’s brother, Andy Moorman, announced that he was recruiting volunteers for an independent search set to begin on September 24.
Before it began, agents of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation came across human remains near Moffat, in Saguache County, during an unrelated search. Authorities had been searching for another missing woman, and the remains were about 45 miles from where Suzanne lived.
The El Paso County coroner identified them as Suzanne’s on September 27, and no arrests had been made at that point. Barry told Good Morning America that investigators had focused on him alone and were wrong to do so.
A 2024 autopsy ruled Suzanne’s death a homicide by undetermined means. Her remains showed no signs of trauma, but investigators found in her bone marrow a mixture of three drugs used to tranquilize wildlife, known as BAM, for butorphanol, azaperone, and medetomidine.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor who had handled the first case faced consequences of her own. Linda Stanley was disbarred in November 2024 over misconduct tied to the Morphew case and another high-profile case, and the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the decision in September 2025.
In June 2025, the 12th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, rather than the 11th District that had handled the first prosecution, took the case to a grand jury. On June 20, the grand jury indicted Barry on a charge of first-degree murder, and he was taken into custody in Arizona before being extradited to Colorado.
The indictment states that BAM is a chemical Barry acknowledged using in the past, and that prescription records showed he was the only private citizen in that part of the state with access to it when Suzanne disappeared.
It also addressed the glove-box DNA, stating that only three people could even remotely be connected to the mixture and that none had any involvement in the case. Barry’s attorney, David Beller, said he maintains his innocence. Barry was released in September 2025 on a $3 million bond.
On January 12, 2026, Barry pleaded not guilty in an Alamosa County courtroom, and a six-week trial was set to begin October 13. In April 2026, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of his civil lawsuit.
On June 24, Judge Amanda Hopkins granted the defense’s request for more time to review what its attorneys called a mountain of evidence, over objections from prosecutors and Suzanne’s siblings, saying she wanted the family to go through the trial only once.
On July 6, she set the trial for July 19, 2027, and it is expected to last from a month to five weeks.
On August 26, 2026, a hit-and-run crash involving two vehicles occurred in Denver. Judge Hopkins wrote that video showed a person “very clearly” Barry refusing to give his name, offering the other driver $300 for the damage, and leaving when she said she was calling police.
He has not been charged over the crash. Prosecutors alleged that GPS data showed he used his work exception for non-work travel, including to Denver International Airport.
On September 2, Hopkins ordered him to stay home at all times, with no exceptions, and Boulder County deputies arrested him the next night on a warrant for failing to comply with his release conditions.
His attorneys argued that he was not a flight risk and wanted his day in court. On September 8, the judge raised his bond to $10 million, cash only, saying he had shown a capacity to commit new offenses while out on bond.
If he posts it, he must wear a GPS monitor and may not leave his home without the court’s permission, except for a medical emergency or court. Barry has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
Remembering Suzanne
Suzanne’s family and friends remember a life that began in Alexandria, Indiana, a small town where she met Barry while both were in high school.
She competed for homecoming queen, and Barry, a star baseball player, was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays before an injury ended his hopes of a major league career.
Both attended Purdue University, and the couple married in 1994. Suzanne taught middle school before becoming a full-time mother.
In Colorado, Suzanne became an active, physically fit woman who took full advantage of the mountains, and photographs of the family showed everyone smiling and laughing.
Her sister called her a gentle soul, and Cox called her a sweetheart and a real kind lady, almost like an angel.
Melinda Moorman has a message for Suzanne’s daughters: “Mallory, Macy, your mother would have laid down her life for you girls. She would never leave you. She would never forsake you. She loved you with her whole being.”
The Science Behind Why Your Dog Feels Like Family
Ask any dog owner if their pet is considered family, and you are likely to hear a resounding “yes.” Now, new brain scan research gives that intuition biological grounding.
In 2014, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers found that similar regions in the brain were activated when mothers looked at photos of their dogs and when they looked at photos of their own children.
The discovery not only validated the feelings of pet owners, it provided a starting point for investigating the science behind the human-animal bond.
Inside the Brain Scan Study
The study, led by Luke Stoeckel and Lori Palley (and published in the journal PLOS ONE), involved 14 mothers with children and dogs. Each participant had at least one child, age 2-10, and at least one dog that had lived in the family for two or more years.
The research involved two steps. First, the MGH team went to each mother’s home, took photos of her children and her dogs, and asked them to discuss their relationships with each.
Then each mother came to MGH’s Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging for an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scan.
Using a type of MRI scan that measures blood flow, which is an indirect indicator of brain activity, the researchers observed which brain regions were active when each participant looked at a continuously rotating set of photos on a screen.
This set included photos of her own child, her own dog, another child, and another dog, all from the study pool.
According to the Harvard-affiliated hospital’s news service, the results showed similar patterns of brain activity when mothers viewed photos of their own children and photos of their own dogs.
Specifically, the brain regions involved in emotion processing and reward, affiliative behavior and social cognition, and vision and movement were all activated when the mothers viewed photos of their own child or dog. However, some regions within these networks were more strongly activated in response to one than to the other.
The brain region called the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area, which has been associated with bonding, was activated only when the mothers looked at photos of their children. Meanwhile, the fusiform gyrus, which is involved in face processing, was activated more strongly by photos of dogs than by photos of children.
When asked to rate how exciting or pleasant each photo was, the mothers reported similar levels of excitement and pleasure when viewing photos of their own child or dog.
However, the gap between how mothers rated their own child versus an unfamiliar child was larger than the gap between how they rated their own dog versus an unfamiliar dog.
“The importance of pets in the lives of many people is unquestionable,” noted Palley, a doctor of veterinary medicine at MGH’s Center for Comparative Medicine, who participated in the study. “Our findings provide biological evidence for the devotion and companionship that people feel toward their pets.”
The Chemistry Behind the Human-Animal Bond
While the MGH team used brain scans to explore this bond, another research team has investigated the role of chemical messengers in the body.
About a year after the MGH study appeared, researchers at Azabu University in Japan, led by Miho Nagasawa, identified a potential biochemical basis for the attachment between pets and their owners.
In a paper published in the journal Science, the team reported that dogs and their owners experience an increase in oxytocin, sometimes called the “bonding hormone,” when they spend time looking into each other’s eyes.
Nagasawa and her colleagues found that dogs and their owners both experienced elevations in oxytocin when they made prolonged eye contact. Further, the more time a dog spent staring at its owner, the more oxytocin was produced, which in turn made the owner more affectionate, encouraging the dog to continue staring.
This “oxytocin feedback loop” was not observed in similar experiments using wolves and their owners.
The researchers speculate that this mechanism, which has not been seen in other animals, emerged as dogs and humans spent thousands of years living together. This explanation fits with research on oxytocin’s role in mother-baby bonds, which also involve intense eye contact.
Further research is needed before scientists can conclude that this mechanism influences dogs’ behavior toward humans, says Nagasawa. Some researchers have argued that the study’s sample size was small and that it should have included more wolves for comparison.
Additionally, the gender of the owner may influence oxytocin levels; the study’s owners were both male and female.
Even so, these findings, too, fit with the MGH study, suggesting that similar biochemical processes underlie human bonds with other humans and with dogs.
Why This Matters
The research findings from both studies align with the experiences of pet owners, as documented in numerous public health surveys. In particular, the American Heart Association (AHA) has published a series of scientific statements on the relationship between pet ownership and heart health.
In 2013, the AHA published a statement about pets and cardiovascular health, authored by Glenn Levine, MD, of Baylor College of Medicine, and his colleagues.
Levine, who chaired the statement on behalf of the AHA’s Council on Clinical Cardiology and Council on Cardiovascular and Stroke Nursing, noted that pet ownership “is likely to be associated with reduced risk of incident cardiovascular disease.”
His team wrote that pet ownership, and particularly dog ownership, was linked to lower blood pressure and better lipid profiles, as well as increased physical activity and reduced stress response. Studies reviewed by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) also linked pet ownership to decreased feelings of isolation and loneliness.
In fact, most pet owners would probably agree, according to a 2024 survey from Morning Consult conducted for the American Psychiatric Association and released jointly with the American Veterinary Medical Association.
The survey queried pet owners about the effect of pets on their mental health. Among the key findings was that most pet owners believe their pets positively affect their emotional well-being.
APA President Petros Levounis, MD, MA, commented on the survey results, saying that pets provide “a source of companionship, comfort, love, and friendship” and that he often encourages his patients struggling with addiction or other mental health issues to consider getting a pet.
Meanwhile, the Human Animal Bond Research Institute tracks the physiological effect of human-animal interactions. As revealed by this institute’s research, spending time with a pet can lower stress hormones such as cortisol and increase oxytocin and dopamine, as well as lower heart rate and blood pressure.
None of this would be possible if pet ownership did not activate some of the same physiological pathways as human social interactions, including those that strengthen interpersonal bonding.
What These Studies Mean
None of this research suggests that a pet is an exact substitute for a child, and the authors of both studies note the limitations of their research. For one, the MGH study used fMRI technology, which can identify which brain regions are involved in a certain activity but cannot establish causality.
In other words, the scans can show that a particular brain region “lights up” when you look at photos of your child and photos of your dog, but they cannot show that one causes the other.
Moreover, while the MGH study included 14 participants, the sample size was small, and the study only included women who were parents. The study design did not take into account whether similar effects would occur in men or in people who did not have children. A larger study with a more diverse group of participants would be needed to investigate that question.
Meanwhile, Nagasawa’s team agrees that further research is needed to explore how oxytocin underlies people’s connections with their pets.
In particular, the study needs to be replicated with a larger sample size, and additional research is needed to understand how this mechanism might differ in dogs and in wolves. Some researchers argue that the results could be skewed because the study included only a few wolves.
Even with these limitations, the results of the studies have stood the test of time. Researchers who have studied the human-animal bond for years believe that their findings reflect real connections.
Brain scans, oxytocin measurements, and public health surveys all indicate that the powerful sense of companionship that people feel toward their pets activates biological processes similar to those triggered by time spent with human loved ones.
In fact, this research merely formalizes what pet owners have long known.
Sources
Patterns of Brain Activation when Mothers View Their Own Child and Dog: An fMRI Study
Mothers’ brains show similar responses to her baby and her dog
Oxytocin-gaze positive loop and the coevolution of human-dog bonds
Pet Ownership and Cardiovascular Risk: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association
The Remarkable Human-Animal Bond
‘The pet effect’: Exploring research on the human-animal bond