Marcello Siniscalchi and his team at the University of Bari have created something dog lovers didn't know they needed: a standardized test to measure whether their pup is truly left-pawed, right-pawed, or happily ambidextrous. The new tool, called the Doginburgh Inventory, finally gives researchers a reliable way to assess paw preference across different tasks—solving a problem that has long vexed animal scientists trying to understand canine laterality.
Like humans, dogs show a natural preference for one side of their body. But here's where it gets complicated: a dog might favor its left paw for holding a Kong toy steady while using its right paw to reach for food inside it. This task-dependent variation made it nearly impossible to capture a dog's true paw bias with any single test. The Kong test, long a standard in the field, revealed only part of the picture.
The solution came from an unexpected place: human psychology. Siniscalchi's team borrowed from the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, a tool that has measured human hand dominance since the early 1970s. They adapted this proven framework for dogs, creating the Doginburgh Inventory by combining four physical challenges into one comprehensive assessment. The test includes two manipulation-based tasks—the Kong test and a food-reaching test—alongside two locomotion-based tasks that track which paw a dog uses when stepping down stairs from a stationary position and when stepping off a raised walkway.
The researchers tested their new inventory on 43 healthy family dogs ranging in age from one to ten years old, representing various breeds. What emerged was a more nuanced picture of canine paw preference. Rather than the crude left-or-right binary, the Doginburgh Inventory classifies dogs into five distinct categories: strong left, weak left, ambilateral, weak right, and strong right. This finer-grained approach matters because it allows researchers to investigate how motor laterality connects to physiological and cognitive processes—relationships that might be invisible in cruder measurements.
"A key advantage of the 'Doginburgh Inventory' lies in its classification of subjects into five distinct motor laterality categories," the researchers noted in their paper, published in Royal Society Open Science. Understanding paw preference is far more than trivia for dog owners. Scientists have found links between laterality and behavioral differences, stress responses, and cognitive abilities in dogs. This knowledge could prove valuable for training programs, welfare assessments, and the careful selection of working or service dogs, where such subtle traits might influence performance.
Siniscalchi's team acknowledges they are still in the early stages. The current study serves as a proof of concept, and they plan to expand the inventory by adding more physical tasks and testing with larger, more diverse dog populations. As the Doginburgh Inventory evolves, it promises to give dog researchers—and dog owners curious about their own pets' quirks—a clearer window into the motor preferences that make each dog unique.