Did you ever wonder why Ringo just can’t seem to warm up to strangers? Well, check if he is a left-pawed dog, that might have something to do with it.
New inquiry published in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior proposes that dog that shows a fondness for their left paws are more likely than dogs with no paw preference (ambilateral dogs) to show violence toward people they don’t know.
“I reported a statistically meaningful relationship between stranger-rapt aggression and the manifestation of a paw preference,” a post-doctoral research officer at the University of Adelaide in Australia, named Dr. Luke Schneider, told The Huffington Post in an email. “Dogs without a paw preference showed lower aggression counts. When I looked more carefully at the dogs with a paw preference, it looked that it was those dogs with a preference for the left paw that were goading this relationship.”
The research found no indication to reinforce a relationship between paw preference and overall temperament.
In the study, a “Kong” dog toy was exploited to gauge the paw preference of 73 usually friendly pet dogs on a scale from -100 (strong preference for using left paw) to +100 (strong preference for using right paw). To evaluate the dog’s inclination toward aggression, the scholars had the dogs’ owners finished a temperament questionnaire.
Aggression in dogs is arbitrated by many factors, of course, including the animals’ health and age. But the scholars say the results of the research may reflect the lateralization of brain function in dogs — and probably, by extension, humans as well. The left and right hemispheres of the brain are known to manipulate opposite sides of the body.
“The precooked idea for me is that there looks to be more resemblance between human and animal brains than we once understood,” Schneider said.
Among pups, being left-pawed is not rare. While only about 10 percent of humans are left-handed, there seems to be an even split between right-pawed, left-pawed, and ambilateral canines, Schneider noted.
