Is Your Dog Right-Pawed or Left-Pawed? Here’s How to Figure It Out, According to a New Study

Researchers devised a series of tests to measure your furry friend’s laterality, which can be associated with behavior, emotion and cognition

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

June 12, 2026 3:23 p.m.

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Are you a righty or a lefty? That trait—the preference of using one side of the body over another—is known as laterality. And it’s not unique to humans. Dogs, among other animals, also have a favorite paw to use when holding a toy or taking a first step.

Now, scientists have devised a new assessment to measure paw preference in our barking pals, described in a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science on June 10. They’ve named it the “Doginburgh Inventory” after the test used to examine hand dominance in humans, the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory.

The tool can help researchers understand how brain lateralization relates to “behavior, emotions and cognition, not only in dogs but also in other species,” says Shany Dror, an animal cognition researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, who was not involved in the work, to Jackie Flynn Mogensen at Scientific American.

Some past research, for instance, suggests left-pawed dogs are more pessimistic than those that use their right paw more or have no preference, called ambilateral (like when humans are ambidextrous), wrote Deborah Wells, an animal behavior researcher at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, for the Conversation in 2023. Studies also indicate that canines with weaker paw preferences seem to react more strongly to loud sounds, and that ambilateral dogs show more traits of aggression and fearfulness.

That’s because of brain wiring, Wells added. “The left side of a dog’s brain—which controls the right side of its body—is more concerned with processing positive emotions. By contrast, the right side of a dog’s brain—which controls the left side of the body—focuses more on negative emotions, such as fear or anxiety.”

However, many past studies examining pawedness involved only one task to determine it, even though dogs often switch up their preferred side depending on what they’re doing.

The newly developed Doginburgh Inventory test, meanwhile, involves four tasks, which you can also do with your pet: two “manipulation” tests and two “locomotion” tests.

In one manipulation test, which was conducted at the lab, dogs were given a Kong toy—shaped like a hollow, rounded cone—filled with food. The researchers recorded which paw the animals used to stabilize the toy over several trials. The other manipulation test was done at home. The dogs’ owners put a treat under furniture, like a couch, and filmed which paw the pets used to reach for the snack.

The dogs came back to the lab for the locomotion tests. In one of them, the dogs started off sitting at the top of a staircase, and researchers recorded which paw they used to descend the first step. The second one involved taking the dog on a leashed walk and seeing which paw they extended when descending a single step, such as stepping off a curb.

“By analyzing the number of left-paw and right-paw usages across different trials for different tests, we calculated one score for direction and another for the strength of the dog’s lateralization,” study co-author Sevim Isparta, a veterinarian and behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Italy, tells Phie Jacobs at Science.

Some unusual situations arose while conducting the research. One dog had a great strength score for its left paw based on at-home trials. Turns out that was because the pet didn’t have the right one—it had been surgically removed to treat cancer, says study co-author Marcello Siniscalchi, a veterinary physiologist at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, to Science.

“Why did the owner choose to participate in the experiment? That’s the real question,” he adds.

Of the 43 dogs assessed during the study, 11 strongly preferred their left paw, 3 strongly preferred their right paw, and the others sat somewhere in between. There was no overarching preference, unlike in humans, about 90 percent of whom use their right hand more often than their left.

If you want to examine pawedness in your own pet, have your dog complete several trials for each of the four tests (the study used 10 to 20 per test). Then, for each test, add the number of times your dog used its left or right paw over the trials. Next, subtract the number of left-paw uses from the number of right-paw uses, and divide that by the overall number of uses. The calculated decimal value between -1 and 1 is your pet’s laterality index for that test.

Then, multiply that number by 100 for the laterality quotient. The quotient will fall within a range between -100 to 100, which you can convert into a score between -2 and 2, which corresponds to your dog’s pawedness for a specific test. To do that, -100 to -60 gets converted to -2, -60 to -20 gets converted to -1, -20 to 20 gets converted to 0, 20 to 60 gets converted to 1 and 60 to 100 gets converted to 2.

For a measure of your dog’s overall pawedness, repeat the calculations for the rest of the tests. Then, add all the resulting positive scores, which correspond to the right paw, and separately, add the negative scores, which correspond to the left paw. Plug the resulting numbers into the laterality index equation, and multiply the decimal value you get by 100.

You should also account for your pet’s consistency across tests. Divide the number of tests where your dog showed a paw preference, zero to four, by the total number of tests, which is four.

Multiply the consistency value by the pawedness number across all tests. The resulting value will be -100 to 100, and the previously used conversion can tell you where your dog is on the scale from “strong left-pawed” to “strong right-pawed.” After that, you’ll know whether your furry friend favors the same side as you.

“It’s easy to do,” Siniscalchi tells Scientific American. But be sure to pay attention to little details when your dog is carrying out the trials, because some can skew the results, he says.

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.