Prefer dogs to humans? You're not alone (or unbalanced)

The field of psychotherapy has traditionally viewed those whose closest relationships are with animals as somehow lacking, their affections pathologically misplaced, their devotion a symptom of their inability to forge healthy connections with the humans around them.

But in recent years, researchers have begun to take far more seriously the bonds between humans and animals and to evaluate those relationships in a more positive light.

"There are whole segments of the population that prefer being in the company of dogs than people, and I'm not sure that's such a negative thing," said Joel Gavriele-Gold, a psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan and the author of "When Pets Come Between Partners."

In a recent study, Lawrence Kurdek, a psychologist at Wright State University in Ohio, found that college students who had a high level of attachment to their dogs showed greater attachment to the pets than to their fathers. Their attachment to their mothers, siblings and best friends was just about the same as their attachment to their canine companions, Kurdek found.

The study, reported in the April issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, found that the students who were most strongly attached to their dogs did not show high levels of anxiety or avoidance - characteristics that some therapists would expect to see in people with unusually fierce bonds to animals.

The finding, Kurdek wrote, supports the idea that "people strongly attached to their pet dogs do not turn to pet dogs as substitutes for failed interactions with humans."

A Web site in Britain , www.marryyourpet.com, features testimonials from pet owners who claim, seriously or not, that their relationships with their dogs or cats are primary. And Marc Bekoff, an animal researcher in Colorado, said he was startled recently at a meeting when a woman kept talking about her "significant other."

It turned out, he wrote in an e-mail message, that she was talking about a beagle.