Do dogs and their owners look alike?
Rayne McKenzie knows dogs. She has a dog care business called See Spot Run!
That qualifies her as a sort of expert for our question, which she answered surrounded by pooches in Partner Park in South Land Park.
"I'm half black and half white and my dog's half black and half white," she said.
Well, yes and no.
McKenzie is of mixed race, with a nice even café au lait tone to her skin, while her dog, Domino … well, maybe the name gives it away.
Her dog is spotted, a black-and-white Dalmatian.
She said, "If you come in the evening (to the dog park), you'll see a lot of matchups."
There is a bit of a tendency for people and pets to look alike, according to the small amount of research that has been done.
"It's the kind of thing that everyone has wondered about," said Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychology professor at the University of California, San Diego.
He decided to test it.
He and a colleague photographed dogs and their owners separately and asked people to match them.
If more than half the people matched a pair, they were deemed to look alike.
While 16 of 25 purebreds were matched accurately, mongrels were matched less than half the time.
The results were published in Psychological Science. Other studies had similar results, Christenfeld said.
What does it mean?
Christenfeld thinks it could be a manifestation of a trait developed through evolution.
Humans may have developed to care for small things that look like themselves: their own babies, of course, but perhaps dogs that resemble them, too.
Many people clearly have a parental attitude toward their pets, especially when they don't yet have kids.
When Julia McCabe of Lincoln submitted a photo of herself and her dog Billy to SacPaws.com, she wrote (pretending to be the dog), "People say that I have Mommy's hair but Daddy's eyes."
She and her boyfriend, Tharon Aydt, refer to themselves as the pup's parents. She is a blonde, as is the dog.
Both Billy and Doggy Daddy have an unusual eye color. "My boyfriend's eyes are almost like an amber color," McCabe said, and the parent-offspring resemblance is picked up by a lot of their friends.
"It's just a frequent joke that people say," she said.
While people, especially those with unruly hair, are sometimes said to resemble their dogs, few people offer that they look like a cat.
Still, the resemblance is unmistakable in a photo of Sacramento's Allyson Arai with her sister's cat Bookie, taken when Bookie was a kitten.
With her lips pursed, eyebrows raised and eyes wide, Arai looked much like the little Siamese.
"He's huge now, but the resemblance is still there," she said.
She's another one who refers to family resemblance, although because Bookie is her sister's, she calls herself "Auntie."
The resemblance is more than physical. "We act very similar," Arai said, "He gets in little moods sometimes and I … have my moments."
Back at Partner Park, most owners thought the behavioral similarities were greater than the visual ones.
"If the guy is really nice, he has a nice dog," said Bob Street of Sacramento.
McKenzie agreed. "I think it's more lifestyle."
Then again, she said, "I do know one or two anorexics who have greyhounds."
Call The Bee's Carlos Alcalá, (916) 321-1987.
