Many dogs are warier of a man they don’t know than of a woman they don’t know. Earlier studies in kennels, shelters and guide dog programs picked this up through barking, lip-licking, growling, a lowered tail and how close a dog would stand. In 2023 my colleagues and I at Cornell University published a study of a sign you can see on any walk: whether a dog pees and poops.
Scent marking is a useful measure because it shifts when dogs are stressed. Adult male dogs sometimes drop back to a puppy’s lean-forward posture during loud or frightening events. At the shelter where we worked, adult males lifted a leg for 73% of their urinations, against 94 to 97% reported for males living in other settings.
How we ran the study
We walked dogs at the Tompkins County SPCA in Ithaca, New York, between 2018 and 2023. Our team had six men and six women. Each walk lasted 20 minutes in a large field across from the shelter, the dog set the pace, and the walker recorded every urination and defecation. In the first study, 113 dogs were each walked by a man and by a woman they had never met. In the second, we kept walking 81 of those dogs after they knew us, with some dogs walked more than 30 times.
What we found
Adult males urinated more often with a woman holding the leash than with a man. Adult females urinated at about the same rate with both. Dogs were also much less likely to poop with a man: on first walks, the chance that a dog defecated was about 70% with a woman and about 37% with a man. We read both results as the dogs being less at ease with men they didn’t know.
Dogs under a year old were less affected by who was walking them. We think adult dogs may have learned to be wary of unfamiliar men from earlier experiences, though our study did not test that.
In the second study the patterns held on later walks, after the dogs had spent time with their walkers. Shelter dogs meet vets, staff, volunteers and visitors, and that may make them less sensitive to who is familiar. Pet dogs usually do treat their own people differently from strangers, so a dog at home may relax with a regular walker in a way these shelter dogs did not.
We don’t know what the dogs were picking up on. Other research points to petting style, voice (in one shelter study, women talked to dogs more and in higher-pitched voices) and possibly smell. Our walkers were mostly in their early twenties, and we did not control for walker age.
For your dog
If your adult dog skips peeing or pooping on a walk with someone new, especially a man, it may be nerves. Give a little extra time on the next walk and let your dog set the pace.
It is one reason we suggest a meet & greet before the first walk and keep your dog with the same concierge each time. If your dog is warier of men or of women, tell us at the consultation so we can take it into account when we match your dog with a concierge.
Source
- McGuire, B., Kok, P., Garland, M., Guy, B., Jackson, A., & Haber, S. (2023). Influence of walker sex and familiarity on scent-marking behavior of juvenile and mature shelter dogs. Animals, 13(23), 3649. Read the paper · doi:10.3390/ani13233649