In studies observing the reactions people get while out and about with dogs, researchers have found that strangers offer more smiles and friendly glances to people with dogs, and are more likely to approach and have a conversation with someone with a canine companion. In one study from 2008, people helped a stranger who dropped a handful of coins pick them up more often if he had a dog with him, and were more likely to give him money for the bus when he asked.

People typically treat strangers in public places with what the sociologist Erving Goffman termed “civil inattention.” They may acknowledge each other with brief glances, but they’ll look quickly away. The glancer is recognizing that the other person is there, but signaling that he himself doesn’t want to interact, and also being respectful of the fact that the other person probably doesn’t want to interact, either.

But dogs do not give a hoot about our elaborate, chilly social dances. They’ll interact with whomever they like, thanks very much. This helps break the barrier of civil inattention in two ways: One, if you see someone with a dog, and you like dogs, then you know you have something in common with that person, making them a little bit less of an unknown. And two, “it is as if the interactional openness of pet dogs … is highly contagious, infecting and transforming anyone who accompanies them in public into ‘open persons.’”

So wrote researchers in a 1991 paper in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography in which one of the authors straight-up infiltrated a group of dog owners that hung out at his local park and took notes on their behavior as he slowly became their friend. He noticed that the dog owners were open to talking with other people in the park, and welcomed other dog owners (who weren’t part of their group) to let their dogs off the leash to play. But the conversations were pretty much entirely dog-centric, and at first the owners would even address a newcomer’s dog rather than the person.

On the author’s second visit to the park with his dog, Max, one of the women from the group came up to them. “She bent down and began petting Max,” he wrote. “She spoke to him in the tones a mother uses with her child: ‘You’re so cute! What a good boy. You’re so friendly, aren’t you? Yes, you are.’ She then directed a number of questions to me: ‘What’s his name? How old is he?’”

The term for what she’s doing is “triangling”—addressing the dog instead of the human in order to minimize the risk of talking with a stranger. The dog is a safer target; it probably won’t reject you. (I mean, it might wander away to pee or chase a squirrel.)

“It gives them a very safe target of conversation,” says Lynette Hart, a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of California, Davis. This is true of other animals as well—a study Hart did in 1992 found that people were more likely to approach a stranger sitting in a park with a turtle or a rabbit than if they were sitting there blowing bubbles or watching television.