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A new study indicates that dogs don’t like hugs, which could be surprising to a lot of dog owners.
According to Stanley Coren of Psychology Today, animal behaviorists believe hugging dogs is akin to immobilizing them and raises their stress and anxiety levels.
In an attempt to prove this theory, Coren collected photos from the Internet of people hugging dogs and judged the dogs’ visible stress indicators, such as drooped ears and avoidance of eye contact.
“I can summarize the data quite simply by saying that the results indicated that the Internet contains many pictures of happy people hugging what appear to be unhappy dogs. In all, 81.6% of the photographs researchers scored showed dogs who were giving off at least one sign of discomfort, stress, or anxiety. Only 7.6% of the photographs could rate as showing dogs that were comfortable with being hugged. ” Coren says.
The remaining 10.8% of the dogs either were showing neutral or ambiguous responses to this form of physical contact.
Coren says his experiment seems consistent with other research which suggests that people, especially children, seem to have difficulty reading signs of stress and anxiety based upon their dogs’ facial expressions. He believes the data clearly shows that while a few dogs may like being hugged, more than four out of five dogs find this human expression of affection to be unpleasant and/or anxiety arousing.
It can even cause a dog to bite, bad news if your face is close to theirs.
Maybe a nice pat or a treat would be better.
Agencies/Canadajournal
Not true. Dogs can learn to understand what a hug means when they are young and many do.
My dogs come to solicit hugs from us, not just tolerate them.
It’s true that a hug is a threatening to dogs when they first encounter it and for older dogs who have never known this, I would agree that it’s problematic. It largely depends on the disposition of the animal. Dogs can even hung you back in their own way by leaning up against you.
Teach your dog the meaning of a hug when they are young, it’s the best.