Linguistic Vindication

I was once criticized--by Scott Baldinger, on his blog Word on the Street--for referring to the people with whom dogs live as the dogs' humans. He seemed to think, if memory serves (the post can no longer be accessed on gotohudson.net), that owner would be a more appropriate term. Now we learn, in The New York Times, that brain imaging findings show that "dogs have a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child," which suggests that the appropriate term for a dog's human companion is not owner but guardian: "Dogs Are People, Too." I'm not too far off thinking of myself as William's human, as he is my dog.