Was Your Dog Harder to Train During the Pandemic? Science Says You’re Not Alone

Lockdown during the covid pandemic was hard on everyone, including our dogs. New research out today suggests dogs were harder to train in the years following 2020 but became more teachable as restrictions loosened.

A study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One analyzed owner-reported behavioral data for more than 47,000 companion dogs during and immediately after the covid-19 pandemic. The researchers looked for trends in fear, attention, aggression, and trainability, finding that average trainability scores were higher among dogs in 2020 but lower in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Notably, those scores began inching back closer to the 2020 scores in 2023, suggesting that dogs and owners were finally getting the hang of training routines as the pandemic waned.

Pandemic puppies to blame?

This trend may partly reflect a surge in adoptions early in the pandemic, when puppies and newly adopted dogs required more intensive training as they adjusted to their new homes. This increase is mainly supported by anecdotal evidence rather than data, however. Reports from the Shelter Animals Count national database show that the national adoption rate actually declined 17% from 2019 to 2020 and remained below 2019 levels in 2021.

Study co-author Courntey Sexton, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, also notes that most dogs included in the study were adults or seniors with training experience. Instead of pointing the finger at pandemic puppies, she suggested another possible explanation: “it may have been that routines were shifted, life was harder, the dog was responding to stress in your environment, and things just got complicated,” she told Gizmodo.

A shift in dog behavior or owners’ attitudes?

Intriguingly, trainability was the only behavioral trait that showed a significant trend in one direction or the other. Considering the changes in environment and routines dogs experienced during the pandemic, “that was a little bit strange,” Sexton said. To her, this speaks to the fact that pet owners and their dogs each faced unique challenges from 2020 to 2023.

“We all experienced this big thing, but we’re all going through it in our own ways,” she said.

The survey data comes from the Dog Aging Project, a longitudinal study that aims to track the health of companion dogs over a 10-year period to investigate the effects of aging. Participating owners fill out extensive annual surveys about their dogs’ health and behavior, with more than 50,000 dogs enrolled since the project began collecting data in 2019.

Sexton noted that the data used in her study is based on owners’ perceptions of their dogs’ behavior, which may have been skewed by pandemic circumstances. Owners might have been more impatient with their pets due to isolation and stress during lockdown, leading them to report lower trainability scores.

“Dog behavior is often very responsive to human behavior,” she added. It’s also possible that owners’ frustrations rubbed off on their dogs, making them less teachable and more prone to bad behavior.

“They really are, in lots of ways, mirrors to ourselves, and we’re finding that out more and more,” Sexton said. “By paying attention to them and our relationships with them, I think we can only learn more.” She and her colleagues will use their findings as a starting point from which to continue following behavioral changes in these canine cohorts as they age.