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While one in ten people worldwide are left-handed, scientists have been wondering about animals: What about cats, dogs, or even octopuses? Recent research suggests that side preferences are not unique to humans, but extend to the animal world more widely than we thought.
Left-handers face many challenges in daily life in a world designed for right-handers. But the tendency to have a dominant side doesn’t just apply to humans. Scientists have shown that animals have preferences for either the right or left side, too. It doesn’t matter whether they have feet or fins, even an octopus can have a preferred tentacle that is more responsive or moves more easily and skillfully than others.
People have long considered right- or left-handedness to be a human phenomenon, even dedicating an annual day to it, August 13. But a global study conducted in 2021 revealed that about 10% of humans are left-handed, and it shed light on the phenomenon in animals as well.
Biopsychologist Sebastian Ocklenburg of the Hamburg Medical School confirmed that handedness is a type of brain asymmetry, common in humans and animals alike, and that many animals have a dominant paw, which is influenced by genetic and environmental factors. He adds that many animal species show a preference for left and right.
The study, led by Ocklinburg and other scientists including Felix Strokens and Onur Güntürkün, looked at 119 species of animals, including cats, parrots and monkeys. About a third of the species showed no clear preference for a particular side, but most animals did, and they often preferred to use their left hand, just as humans tend to be right-handed.
In another study, Oklenburg explained that handedness is the rule, not the exception, in the animal kingdom. Further investigations showed that more than three-quarters of the cats studied were either right- or left-handed, while about a quarter were equally ambidextrous.
The analysis showed similar patterns in dogs, with more than two-thirds preferring either the left or right paw.
Interestingly, animals that don’t have arms or legs in the traditional sense, such as turtles and crabs, also show side preferences. For example, female leatherback turtles show a preference for using their right flipper to cover their eggs. Even the octopus, despite having eight arms, shows a preference for one of them when eating, suggesting that this phenomenon is deeper and more widespread than we thought.
According to an old study conducted by the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolutionary and Cognition Research in Austria. Just like humans, many animal species are more adept at using one of their limbs. Pet owners can use simple tricks to discover for themselves which paw their four-legged friend prefers.
“In principle, most people do this through food-reaching tasks,” says Oklenburg. “These are tasks that the animal has to reach to get the food, so you might hide a treat in a tube so narrow that only one paw can fit through it. If your pet uses the same paw several times in a row to reach the food, you know the animal is using either its right or left paw.”
