Pets can be right-pawed, or left pawed!

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Pets can be left-pawed, right-pawed




Aug. 20, 2004 12:00 AM


I wasn't all that excited about today's question until I started checking it out and found something really cool, or at least it could be really cool if you own an animal and want to find out how smart it is. Or how dumb it is.

Recently it occurred to me that I have never seen my dog scratch himself with his left rear paw. He always uses the right rear paw. Can dogs be right-pawed or left-pawed, like people are right-handed or left-handed?

Sure, why not?

Apparently there have been quite a few studies done on this matter.

For instance, if you hadn't thrown out your stash of the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology from 1955 you could have read "Paw preferences in cats related to hand preferences in animals and man" by one J. Cole.

Cole, a professor at Oxford University, tested 60 cats by offering them some meat in a glass tube and keeping track of which paw they used to get at it. A little more than half of the cats had a preferred paw and two-thirds of those were lefties.

I'm having trouble concentrating on this one because I am also watching the Olympics - the finals of mixed-doubles badminton. This is oddly absorbing.

Apparently a lot of animals have been tested for handedness. The thing of it is that it is not unusual for individual animals to a have a left or right preference.

However, we seem to be the only species with what they call "population-level handedness." The studies vary, but somewhere between 70 and 95 percent of us are right-handed.

Anyway, this is the cool thing. It seems that not too long ago the BBC ran a series of programs that showed people how to test their pets and then report the results.

For instance, you can test your goldfish's memory span or determine if your horse is left-hooved or right-hooved or check your gerbil's IQ.

I'm thinking this is just the sort of thing that would appeal to you people, or at least to you people with pets.

The Web address for Test Your Pet is kind of long: www.bbc.co.uk/sn/ tvradio/programmes/ testyourpet But once you get there it's pretty easy to use.

The results of the BBC programs showed the top five smartest animals, in descending order, were dogs, parrots, horses, cats and rats.

Gerbils turned out to be the dumbest, although as far as I know my masters weren't tested.