In the most unsurprising news we’ve stumbled across in a long time, a new study has confirmed what we all already knew.

There’s nothing that we can really say about dogs that hasn’t been said before.

They are the purest, most wonderful creatures on earth and we have done nothing to deserve them.

In fact, as a species, we love them so much that should anything bad happen to them we often feel way more wronged than we do if it happened to a fellow human.

Sociologists and anthropologists from Northeastern University and the University of Colorado have been looking into why that may be.

The researchers asked 256 college students to read a fictitious news report, and explore their levels of empathy for a brutally beaten adult or child versus an adult dog or puppy.

As we all could have guessed, the results showed that the participants felt more empathy towards the dog than the adult.

“We also found more empathy for victims who are human children, puppies, and fully-grown dogs than for victims who are adult humans. Age makes a difference for empathy toward human victims, but not for dog victims.”

Within the study, researchers also discuss another dog versus human experiment conducted by a British charity.

In that experiment, people were shown two versions of the same ad which read “Both contained text that read, ‘Would you give £5 to save Harrison from a slow, painful death?”.

One version featured a picture of the real Harrison Smith, an eight-year-old boy diagnosed with Duchenne (Muscular Dystrophy). The other featured a stock photo of a dog.

The ads were run on MSN’s UK website, encouraging donations to a charity. The advert with the dog attracted twice as many clicks.

Concluding the study, the researches summarise why our attitudes may be like this: “It may be that many people appraise dogs as vulnerable, regardless of their age, when compared to adult humans. In other words, dogs, whether young or adult, are seen as possessing many of the same qualities associated with human babies; they are seen as unable to fully protect themselves, compared to adult humans.”