What I mean by that is that humans and dogs have a fundamental connection, like England and America's special relationship, that has been forged over the past 100,000 years. It is in our genes to live with dogs and them with us. Anyone who says they don't like dogs is simply expressing a learned emotion based on a bad experience.
Here's my hypothesis: genetic evidence indicates dogs began separating from wolves at least 100,000 years ago. Human DNA studies indicate there was a "population bottleneck" 50,000 to 100,000 years ago most likely after the Mt. Toba eruption 70,000 years ago. Therefore, I hypothesize that when humanity was down to its last few thousand families dogs had to be there, and it was because of dogs that humans survived. But what was the relationship? That is the PhD candidate question.
And these are the other questions I have (at this time):
Did dogs begin their morphological changes at this time?
Did humanity survive because dogs were with them?
Did only humans who could bond with canines survive?
Not sure any of this will be known with any certainty unless time travel is invented, but my educated guess is that we all have bred into us a connection to dogs that comes from a time when they saved us and we saved them.
For further reading, PBS's Nova program last night got me thinking about the time line. See: Dogs Decoded
And for information on the human DNA studies see Wikipedia's entry on human population bottlenecks which includes a link to the "Toba catastrophe".
