Does Your Dog Hate Hugs? Why It's Wrong To Say 'Yes'

Do our canine companions hate hugging? According to an article in Psychology Today, "New data shows that hugging your dog raises its stress and anxiety levels."

The claim – under the headline "Don't Hug the Dog!" – comes from an expert: Stanley Coren, a professor of psychology and author of over a dozen books on dog behavior. So you might expect solid science to back-up his statement. That's not the case.

Here's what Coren did... after searching Google Images and Flickr using the terms 'hug dog' and 'love dog', he downloaded a 'random' sample of 250 pictures that clearly showed a person hugging a pooch. His team of researchers then examined those photos for signs of stress in response to physical contact – not obvious expressions like baring teeth, but more subtle facial expressions like lowering ears and turning the head to avoid eye contact (away from whatever's annoying or worrying the animal).

Coren's team then put each dog into one of three groups, scoring them based on whether they were showing: 1) at least one sign of discomfort, stress or anxiety; 2) a neutral or ambitious response; or 3) a comfortable and relaxed appearance. Results were: 81.6% of dogs showed signs of discomfort; 10.8% neutral; 7.6% were comfortable with contact. This suggests 4 out of 5 dogs hate hugs.

Based on Coren's data, at least some animals (1-in-5) don't mind physical contact. And many dog owners would offer anecdotal evidence that their pets react to hugging the same way they do to other forms of affection. That said, it wouldn't detract from the claim that it's generally true that dogs don't like hugs.

But that conclusion is too hasty. Picking which photos should be included in the dataset is a subjective process, for instance, so the pics might not represent a truly random sample. As Coren himself points out, there's also pre-selection because people upload images showing they care about animals, which assumes that both human and dog look happy (this illustrates that many of us aren't able to properly recognize doggy stress signals).

It's also possible that dogs – like many humans – don't like having their picture taken. Online photos may not reflect an animal's natural response to hugging – only non-photographic controls would demonstrate whether that's true. As Coren admits, "hugging is not something that dogs like [but] the scientific literature produced very little experimental evidence to support that belief."

Coren's article in Psychology Today doesn't mention whether his study is being published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. And because he hasn't provided details on his methodology, plenty of unanswered questions remain. Did his team limit itself to looking at stress signals, for example, or did it (rightly) check all facial expressions? The article doesn't describe a statistical test either, so how do we know the results are significant?

Overall then, the methods that produced the data are weak, so you can't draw any strong conclusions from its results. Note that does not mean Coren's hypothesis – hugging your dog raises its stress levels – is wrong, only that the idea hasn't been proven correct by studying 250 photos from the internet.

If you know evolutionary biology, some sentences in the article also set-off alarm bells from after-the-fact explanations – 'Just-So' stories. Most notably, as Coren states: "Dogs are technically cursorial animals, which is a term that indicates that they are designed for swift running."

The idea that dogs are "designed" for running is rubbish, ignoring the 32,000-year history of canine domestication. Wolves (and perhaps wolf-like sled dogs, such as huskies) may well be "cursorial animals", but today's domestic dogs have been changed by selective breeding. Modern breeds are whatever humans want, from huge working dogs like the St Bernard to toy dogs like Tinkerbell, the tiny chihuahua that would fit inside Paris Hilton's handbag.

So what about "Don't Hug The Dog"? While it's certainly possible that hugging does indeed raise stress levels, you can't conclude that before Coren's evidence has been reviewed by other scientists.

Until then, we should treat the suggestion that man's best friend hates hugging like any other shaggy dog story.