Is Your Dog Left-Pawed or Right-Pawed? What the Doginburgh Inventory Actually Tells You

Most dogs have a paw preference. We just haven't been paying attention.

A study published in June 2026 and covered by Smithsonian Magazine introduced something called the Doginburgh Inventory, a structured test designed to help owners identify whether their dog consistently favours their left or right paw. What makes this more than a party trick is the finding that paw preference correlates with measurable differences in personality, emotional reactivity, and cognitive traits.

So it's worth knowing. And it turns out, you can figure it out at home.

What the Doginburgh Inventory Actually Is

The test isn't complicated. It tracks which paw your dog uses first, and most consistently, across a set of repeated tasks. The classic one is the Kong test: fill a Kong, place it in front of your dog, and watch which paw they use to steady it. Do this across ten or more trials and you'll start to see a pattern.

A dog that reaches with the right paw more than seven or eight times out of ten is right-pawed. The same logic applies in reverse. Dogs that split it roughly fifty-fifty are considered ambilateral, and that's a genuinely different category, not just indecision.

The Doginburgh Inventory formalises this by adding a few other tasks alongside the Kong test, to build a more reliable picture rather than relying on a single behaviour. The goal is consistency across contexts, because dogs (like people) don't always do things the same way when the situation changes slightly.

Why Paw Preference Is Linked to Temperament

This is where it gets more interesting than I initially expected. The research connects left-pawed and ambilateral dogs with higher rates of anxiety and emotional reactivity. Right-pawed dogs tend to score as calmer and more socially confident.

The likely explanation runs through brain lateralisation. The left hemisphere of the brain broadly governs approach behaviour and positive affect; the right governs avoidance and negative affect. A dog that leads with its right paw is drawing on the left hemisphere. A left-pawed dog, the opposite. So paw preference is a rough window into which hemisphere the dog is drawing on more readily.

Rough is the operative word. This is a population-level correlation, not a diagnostic. Your left-pawed dog is not automatically anxious. But if you already have a dog that seems reactive, or easily unsettled by new environments, knowing they're left-pawed is one more data point that makes the picture coherent.

What Ambilateral Dogs Are Actually Telling You

Dogs without a strong preference tend to show more variable behaviour overall. Some research (including earlier work from the University of Adelaide in 2013, which found that dogs trained as service animals were more likely to be right-pawed) suggests ambilateral dogs may be harder to predict, and may struggle more with consistent responses under pressure.

If your dog switches paws freely across the Kong trials, it's worth watching whether that variability shows up elsewhere. Inconsistent reactions to strangers, or to situations they've handled fine before. It might be nothing. But it's a pattern worth noticing.

How to Run the Test Yourself

You need: a Kong or similar treat-dispensing toy, fifteen minutes across a few separate sessions, and a piece of paper.

Place the Kong directly in front of your dog, centred. Don't put it closer to one side. Let them figure it out. Note which paw touches it first. Reset. Repeat this ten to fifteen times, not all in one go if you can help it, because dogs get bored and start defaulting to whatever worked last time rather than expressing a genuine preference.

Keep a simple tally. Left, right, or neither (for sessions where they don't use a paw at all, just mouth it). At the end, count the totals. Any split more extreme than about 70/30 suggests a genuine preference. Under that, you're probably looking at an ambilateral dog.

One thing to watch: if your dog has any existing injury or discomfort in one limb, that'll skew the results and tells you something different entirely. Worth ruling out first.

What to Do With the Answer

If your dog is strongly left-pawed and you've also noticed anxious or reactive behaviours, this gives you a useful frame. You're not imagining it. The underlying neurology is pointing in the same direction as the behaviour you've been watching.

For reactive dogs, tools like Tailo's video-based episode tracking can help you log exactly when and where reactions occur, which makes it easier to spot whether there's a consistent trigger rather than everything feeling random and stressful.

If your dog is right-pawed and generally calm, you've probably confirmed something you already suspected. That's fine too. Confirmation is useful.

And if they're ambilateral? Keep watching. The inconsistency itself is informative.

One Honest Caveat

The Doginburgh Inventory is a relatively new formalisation of research that's been building for about two decades. The correlations with temperament are real, but they're drawn from studies done almost entirely on pet dogs in Western households. York University published an analysis in June 2026 pointing out that the vast majority of the world's dogs, free-roaming dogs across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, are almost entirely absent from canine behaviour research. So when we say "left-pawed dogs are more anxious", we mean left-pawed dogs in the populations that have been studied. Whether that holds across the full genetic and environmental range of domestic dogs is genuinely unknown.

That's not a reason to ignore the Doginburgh Inventory. It's a reason to hold the conclusions at a reasonable distance and treat them as one input among several, not a verdict.