Dog Huggers Anonymous
My name is Roxanne, and I hug my dogs … a lot. After learning how much dogs hate hugs, I’ve tried to stop, but it’s very hard.
Maybe we should form a support group.
In both her books “The Other End of the Leash” and “For the Love of a Dog,” behaviorist Patricia McConnell notes in several places that dogs don’t like to be hugged, saying they interpret the gesture “as a rude, domineering threat display.”
Most put up with it, but they don’t much like it.
Still … it’s really hard to stop.
McConnell also says: “Hugging is such an important part of expressing affection in
our species, it’s impossible for some people to imagine that their dogs don’t
necessarily like it. This is compounded by the fact that we can’t see the
expression on our dog’s face when we’re hugging her. If you can change
perspectives, and watch a dog’s face when someone else is doing the hugging,
you’ll get an entirely different picture. I have about fifty photographs of
people hugging dogs, in which the human is beaming and the dog is looking
miserable.”