If you're a dog lover who considers your pet to be an essential part of the family, you're not alone. In fact, a new study reveals that people are actually more emphatic to their beloved dogs than they are to other humans. Researchers have been studying various aspects of human and pet relationships lately. While we've learned that talking to your pet is a sign of intelligence and you can communicate with your pup through their adorable puppy dog eyes, this new study analyzes how much we love dogs compared to other people. The research, which was published in Society & Animals, posed the question "are people more disturbed by dog or human suffering?" to 256 undergraduate students by asking them to indicate their degree of empathy after reading a fake newspaper clipping. In the fictitious news report, the victim was attacked "with a baseball bat by an unknown assailant," and was found unconscious, with a broken leg and multiple lacerations, Business Insider reports. The victim was either a 30-year-old adult, a one-year-old baby, a six-year-old dog, or a puppy. The participants were then asked questions to measure their level of empathy for the victim. While the participants did have higher empathy for the puppy and baby human, they also had equally high empathy levels of empathy for the adult dog, while the human adult received the lowest level of empathy. The adult dog only scored lower empathy results when compared to the one-year-old human. The study authors hypothesized that the vulnerability of the victim as measured by their age, and not species, would determine the participants' level of distress and concern, so the fact that even an adult dog ranked earned such high empathy levels was surprising.Dog lovers of the world, rejoice. This latest study proves that many of us consider our dogs to be part of our family. "Subjects did not view their dogs as animals, but rather as 'fur babies,' or family members alongside human children," the authors concluded, according to Business Insider.