“Helen said her class is noisy and that she has a hard time hearing what you’re saying.”

“By fifth period,” he replied, “the kids have a hard time sitting still.”

Kat and I had already heard about his method of making the kids walk laps around the hallway to burn off energy. Maybe this helped some students concentrate, but it took valuable time away from Helen actually learning science.

“Can we move her to a different period?” I asked.

“We can check, but that would require changing her whole schedule.”

“Can you at least move her to the front of the class so she can hear better?”

I think he realized that this was the least painful way to get rid of us.

“Sure, I can do that.”

It was evident that he had been through this type of conference countless times before and that he had heard it all. I felt some small victory in serving notice that we cared about our daughter and that we would not sit idly while she slipped through the cracks of the public school system.

When we got home, Helen was in her room doing homework. I sat with her on her bed. Lyra jumped up to join us.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“Not so good,” I said.

A look of embarrassment flashed across Helen’s face. “What did you do?”

“We tried to get you switched to a different period, but that wasn’t going to happen. The best we could do was getting you moved closer to the front of the room.”

Helen nodded and stroked Lyra’s head. Lyra grinned in delight.

“I think he forgets to teach your period some of the material,” I explained. “You’re just going to have to make a lot of flash cards.”

Science is about questioning how the universe works and discovering new things, not memorizing a series of facts out of a textbook. Science constantly changes as we learn more about the world we live in. What could be more exciting than that? It saddened me that Helen had to learn science with all the life sucked out of it.

Helen continued to smooth out Lyra’s fur.

“Do you think Lyra knows how I feel?” she asked.

“I think she does,” I said. “But hopefully we can prove that through the Dog Project.”

Lyra provided a great deal of comfort to Helen. As the two of them cuddled together, I was struck by their perfect symbiosis. As a golden retriever, Lyra had been honed through generations of selective breeding to get along with humans, especially children. Although the Dog Project had been conceived as an effort to discover what dogs like Lyra and Callie were thinking, Helen’s reaction reminded me that the dog-human relationship is a two-way street. We couldn’t consider the dog brain without taking into account dogs’ effect on humans.

At a superficial level, you can state the obvious: humans like dogs. They provide companionship. They serve as working and utility animals. They hunt. They guard. They are soft and warm and feel good against the skin. But, as I was trying to convey to Helen, science is about asking why things are the way they are.

The scientific study of dogs’ effect on humans has been, until recently, almost nonexistent. Florence Nightingale, the matriarch of nursing, was one of the first to argue for the role of animals in improving human health, writing, “A small pet animal is often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases especially.” But it wasn’t until the last decade, when animal-assisted therapy became more accepted as a treatment for human illness, that researchers began measuring the effect of dogs on humans. Even so, the results have been mixed. For one thing, how can you conduct a double-blind study where neither the researcher nor the patient knows what treatment is being given, if one set of patients gets to play with dogs while the other doesn’t? Double-blind studies are the gold standard in medicine because of the well-known placebo effect. Across the board, for physical and mental illnesses, up to one-third of patients will get better if they believe the treatment they are receiving is effective, even if it is nothing more than a sugar pill.

Demonstrating that dogs and animals in general can improve human health probably won’t meet most medical standards of evidence. But that doesn’t mean animals don’t help people. One study found that animal therapy helped hospitalized heart failure patients by decreasing blood pressure in the lungs, a measure of how much fluid is backing up. Another study suggested that animal therapy reduced the need for pain medications. Hospitalized children in particular seem to benefit from pet therapy, with marked decreases in pain experienced. Many of these studies, however, have used subjective measures like pain as their endpoints. The few studies that have attempted to measure the effects of animals on human biologic measures, like blood pressure or stress hormone levels, have come up with contradictory results.

Interestingly, when you look at the entire literature on animal-assisted therapy, patterns begin to emerge. Of the different animals used in therapy, dogs are the ones associated with the largest beneficial effects on health. And although positive effects were observed in most age groups, children seem to derive the most benefit.

Up until that point, I hadn’t given much thought to how dogs and humans were matched to each other. But watching Helen and Lyra together, it became obvious that Lyra helped soothe Helen’s frustration and that Lyra enjoyed doing so, curling up next to Helen when she was needed most. Callie was a different story. She wasn’t nearly as demonstrative. Even her body language was different. While Lyra was content to put her head in Helen’s lap, Callie preferred to curl up nearby, just out of physical contact. Lyra appeared to be well matched to Helen’s personality, but it surprised me that Callie was better suited to mine. I didn’t care for dogs that fawned over you like slobbering sycophants. I liked dogs that saw themselves as your partner.

In his book Man Meets Dog, the great Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz wrote about the different types of dog-human relationships. Lorenz realized that the loyalty of dogs had no counterpart in human relationships, but that alone did not make them better than people. He believed dogs are “amoral,” without any instinctive sense of right and wrong. Modern research has disputed that statement. For instance, research by primatologist Frans de Waal shows that many animals demonstrate an understanding of fairness.

Lorenz, however, believed that the ideal canine companion was a “resonance dog.” He noted the extraordinary parallelism in personality between many dogs and their owners, sometimes to the point that they even looked alike. According to Lorenz, strong dog-human bonds were created when both human and dog resonated with each other.

Certainly Helen and Lyra resonated. And even though Callie was the relatively new, and somewhat standoffish, dog in the house, I had to admit that she was beginning to resonate with me.

Leaving Helen and Lyra alone after our discussion about science class, I padded downstairs to find my resonant dog. As usual, she was in the backyard.

“Callie, here girl!”

She came bounding into the kitchen smelling like dirt and dog sweat. Wagging her stiff tail very quickly, she looked at me and ran out the door again. Clearly, she wanted me to follow her.

Callie had her nose buried in the ivy with her butt in the air. As I approached, she looked up and started shaking her rear end back and forth. Callie took something in her mouth and flipped it in the air. Whatever it was (probably a mole) emitted a high-pitched squeal, which was soon cut short.

I was impressed with Callie’s hunting skills. Since she had no interest in eating her prey, she hunted either for her own enjoyment or for mine. There was no need to tell Helen about Callie’s predatory activity. That would remain a secret between us.