From Warren Eckstein - Dogs Walked by Men More Aggressive
Nov-09-2011

Dogs being walked by men are four times more likely to threaten and bite other dogs and dogs on a leash are more likely to act aggressively than dogs off the leash.
These are just a couple of revelations about dog walking behavior from an extensive new study that examined how a dog's age, sex and size, as well as the owner's sex and use of a leash affect how canines act on their walks.
The study, accepted for publication in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science, surprisingly found that the sex of the owner had the biggest effect on whether or not the dog would threaten or bite another dog.
"We propose that the occurrence of threat and biting in dogs on a walk may have some connection with aggressive tendencies and/or impulsivity in people," Petr Rezac and his team wrote, adding that "dogs are able to perceive subtle messages of threat emitted by another dog. Simultaneously, dogs are unusually skilled at reading human social and communicative behavior."
Rezac is an associate professor in the Department of Animal Morphology, Physiology and Genetics at Mendel University. He and his colleagues studied close to 2,000 dog-dog interactions on owner-led walks held in the city of Brno, Czech Republic. Observations were made in the mornings and afternoons at 30 different areas of the city where owners frequently walk with their dogs.
By far the most frequent interaction of dogs of all ages in public places was body sniffing, which should not come as a surprise to most dog aficionados. Other expected conclusions: males sniff females more often, males and females prefer play with each other than with members of their own sex, adult males mark the most, puppies play together more than twice as often as adults and 11 times as often as seniors, and dogs prefer to play with similarly sized individuals.

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