Research into moral emotions and other social phenomena in dogs will surely add to our understanding of their perception and behavior in the future. Perhaps we should err on the side of caution and assume that dogs are indeed moral subjects. However, based on the current state of the evidence we cannot make conclusive claims, yet. In addition, the discussion still needs conceptual input, and so we call here for interdisciplinary research on this topic. While embarking on this challenge, we should constantly re-evaluate how far our ethical thinking leads us with reference to less controversial research results, as well as maintain an open mind towards challenging inherited definitions of different capacities when there are good conceptual reasons to do so. After all, the philosophical debate on social capacities in animals increasingly leans towards de-intellectualized accounts of such abilities in animals, including moral abilities (Rowlands, 2012; Mons, 2015) and towards an investigat

, 2018; Benz-Schwarzburg et al., 2019). In any case, our point in the following section is that we already face good reasons to arrive at a more profound ethical consideration of dogs than we often grant them. We will settle with the kind of ethical implications that we can derive safely by focusing on the kind of research results summarized in sections Understanding Human Emotions: How Dogs Read Our Faces and Listen to Our Voices, Understanding Human Gestures: How Dogs Learn to Cooperate, and Understanding Human Actions: How Dogs Learn Our Social Game. We believe that the mentioned capacities suffice to argue that dogs have a profound understanding of human gestures, actions and emotions. They clearly bond with us and enter into relationships of mutual understanding and meaningful interaction. Such relationships have repeatedly been described as characterized by attachment and close bonds. Let us build an ethical argument on that.

Interest in the named abilities in animals is rising among philosophers. This is at least partly because the presence of moral emotions in animals would mean that animals qualify as moral subjects, that is, individuals who sometimes behave on the basis of moral motivations (Rowlands, 2012). Moral emotions thus mark a minimal form of animal morality. This is ethically important. Indeed, it has been argued that minimal morality gives us a reason to owe these animals a special moral consideration, one that goes beyond the welfare approach that we so often use to evaluate our treatment of animals, be it pigs or dogs, cows, or any other non-human species (Mons et al., 2018; Nawroth et al., 2019). If animals are moral subjects, profound ethical implications could follow, for example

CHARACTERIZING THE HUMANDOG RELATIONSHIP: ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES Until now, we have very much emphasized a positive outlook on the humandog relationship. It would be a one-eyed view if we would only mention the obviously positive aspects. For any ethical discussion concerning pet dogs we need to understand Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 9