[bitwize]

Dogs derive much of their meaning and satisfaction in life from their humans. I know that when my wife and I leave ours in the house for too long, they start to become agitated; upon our return one of them, a Catahoula, has made a habit of complaining loudly, as is typical of her breed, as if to say "Where have you been? You belong here with us!" Oh, and a minute can count as "too long".

Shadow gets excited upon hearing "do you want to come with?" because the repetitiveness of the outing doesn't matter. It's time spent with his human and that is more than enough. It's literally what he was made to do: in need of a faithful companion (other humans being too dodgy) we took one of nature's finest predators and engineered it over millennia, bending its will to need our companionship to the point of utter emotional dependency. Dogs, compared to wolves, even have extra muscles around their eyes whose sole purpose appears to be to enable them to emote to humans more effectively.

Furthermore, dogs have the approximate intelligence of a human toddler... do any of you remember being three or four years old, and every single ride in the car was a new adventure to look forward to? I know that half of Hackernews considers it a biological impossibility to remember anything before about age seven, if that, but maybe when you have a toddler-level brain, things are still full of wonder that might be mundane or forgettable to adult humans.