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.

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