Don't Hug the Dog!

Do you think it is good to hug a dog? It is good for human or it is good for dog??? People believe that dogs can reduce stress levels on this matter. But here is a suggestion from Stanley Coren findings.


dogs are not human children. Dogs are technically cursorial animals, which is a term that indicates that they are designed for swift running. That implies that in times of stress or threat the first line of defense that a dog uses is not his teeth, but rather his ability to run away. Behaviorists believe that depriving a dog of that course of action by immobilizing him with a hug can increase his stress level and, if the dog's anxiety becomes significantly intense, he may bite.

Given how widely accepted the idea is that hugging is not something that dogs like, and that hugging a dog may be associated with increasing the likelihood of a dog bite, I was surprised that a search of the scientific literature produced very little experimental evidence to support that belief.

(sample of 250 such pictures)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 total, 81.6% of the photographs that were scored show dogs who were giving off at least one sign of discomfort, stress, or anxiety. Only 7.6% of the photographs could be rated as showing dogs that were comfortable with being hugged. The remaining 10.8% of the dogs either were showing neutral or ambiguous responses to this form of physical contact.

This 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. Much more relevant for the current question is the fact that this 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.


I think it is good to know about his anxiety on hugging. So it is good to inform our children about dog anxiety for preventing from unnecessary incident. It is good to save the hugs for the two-footed family members then for four-footed.

Caution: Whatever posting here is not intended against any age, gender, ethnicity, ideology, religious orientation, etc. It is just for informative and entertaining propose only. Take care.