A Test To Find Out If Your Dog Is Left Or Right Pawed.
Scientists have developed the first standardized test to measure whether a dog is right-pawed, left-pawed, or neither, publishing the new assessment in the journal Royal Society Open Science and naming it the Doginburgh Inventory, a nod to the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory that researchers use to measure hand dominance in humans. The test, developed by researchers at Ankara University in Turkey, combines four physical tasks: the Kong test, in which a dog reaches into a rubber toy for a treat; a food-reaching test; a stationary stepping test at the top of a staircase; and a dynamic stepping test where the dog walks off a raised platform during a leashed walk. Together, the four tasks produce a laterality score that places the dog on a spectrum from strong left-pawed to strong right-pawed, with ambilateral in the middle for dogs that show no consistent preference. Unlike previous single-task tests, which could vary depending on the type of challenge, the Doginburgh Inventory combines locomotion-based and manipulation-based measures to capture a dog's underlying paw preference across different kinds of activity.
The reason researchers care about which paw a dog favors goes well beyond curiosity: laterality in dogs has been linked to differences in behavior, emotional processing, stress responses, and cognitive style, and understanding it has practical implications for training, welfare assessment, and the selection of working and service dogs. Research has previously found that left-pawed dogs tend to show more stress-related behaviors when placed in new or challenging situations, while right-pawed dogs appear to adapt more readily to novel environments, and ambilateral dogs, who show no strong preference, often display distinct personality profiles of their own. An animal cognition researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, who was not involved in the study, told Scientific American that the Doginburgh Inventory could help researchers understand how brain lateralization relates to behavior, emotions, and cognition not just in dogs but across other species. Pet owners can replicate the tests at home using the paper's methodology, and the researchers said they plan to expand the inventory with additional tasks and larger, more diverse groups of dogs before formally validating it for wide use.
