New 'Doginburgh' Test Measures Dogs' Left or Right Paw Preference

A team led by Marcello Siniscalchi and co-author Sevim Isparta at the University of Bari Aldo Moro has introduced the 'Doginburgh Inventory,' a standardized multi-task tool for assessing paw preference in dogs, published June 10, 2026 in Royal Society Open Science. The inventory was modeled on the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, a psychological tool measuring human hand dominance since the early 1970s, and classifies dogs into five categories: strong left-pawed, weak left-pawed, ambilateral, weak right-pawed, and strong right-pawed. The four tasks — a Kong toy stabilization test, a treat-reaching test conducted at home, a stair-descent test, and a curb-stepping test during a leashed walk — were administered to 43 healthy family dogs of various breeds aged 1 to 10. Scores are calculated using a laterality index formula (R−L)/(R+L), converted to a quotient between −100 and 100, and then weighted by a consistency score across all four tests to yield a final paw-preference category. Of the 43 dogs assessed, 11 strongly preferred their left paw, 3 strongly preferred their right, and the remainder fell in between, with no population-wide directional bias comparable to the roughly 90 percent right-handedness seen in humans. Researchers note that dogs often switch preferred paws depending on the task, which is precisely why a multi-test inventory is considered more reliable than any single assessment. The study is described as a proof of concept, with plans to expand the number of tasks and test larger, more diverse dog populations; the researchers also hope pet owners worldwide will use the scoring method to build a large dataset analogous to what exists for human handedness.