van Herwijnen, van der Borg et al. (2018) — PLoS ONE
Dog Ownership Satisfaction Determinants in the Owner-Dog Relationship and the Dog’s Behaviour
Published: July 25, 2026
Most people who get a dog expect the emotional closeness to be what makes the relationship satisfying. A study of 977 Dutch dog owners has found that the reality is more uncomfortable: ownership satisfaction is driven primarily by unwanted dog behaviour and perceived costs, not by emotional closeness or shared activities. And obedience classes, one of the most commonly recommended interventions for improving the owner-dog relationship, showed no significant association with satisfaction at all. 🐾
Researchers I.V. van Herwijnen, J.A. van der Borg, M. Naguib, and B. Beerda analysed questionnaire data from 977 Dutch dog owners using the Monash Dog Owner Relationship Scale — a validated instrument that separates ownership experience into distinct dimensions including perceived costs, shared activities, and perceived emotional closeness. The study design focused on owners who were relatively contented rather than severely dissatisfied, which means its findings apply to the large middle ground of dog ownership experience rather than the extreme cases of abandonment or relinquishment.
What the Data Found About Satisfaction
The probability of being very satisfied with dog ownership was associated with all three subscales of the relationship scale — but not equally. Perceived costs of ownership showed the strongest association. Shared activities showed a moderate association. Perceived emotional closeness to the dog showed the weakest association of the three.
This ordering is counterintuitive and important. Emotional closeness — the dimension most owners would instinctively identify as the heart of the relationship — was the least powerful predictor of overall satisfaction among the three relationship dimensions measured. What mattered most was whether ownership felt costly: financially, physically, emotionally, and in terms of the effort required to manage the dog’s behaviour in daily life.
Aggression and disobedience were directly associated with high perceived ownership costs and with reduced probability of being very satisfied. The relationship was not simply linear — an interaction effect showed that disobedience became less influential on satisfaction at high levels of aggression, suggesting that severe problem behaviour can shift the entire framework within which owners evaluate their experience. When a dog is aggressive, disobedience becomes a secondary concern rather than a primary driver of dissatisfaction.
Choke chain use during obedience classes was associated with high perceived costs and reduced satisfaction — a finding the researchers flag as relevant to understanding why certain training approaches may compound rather than resolve the satisfaction problem they are meant to address.
The Obedience Class Finding That Challenges Common Assumptions ⚠️
Obedience class attendance showed no significant relationship with ownership satisfaction. This finding sits alongside earlier research in this series showing that professional training attendance was associated with higher training-related guilt rather than reduced guilt — and together the two findings paint a consistent picture of formal training classes as an intervention whose relationship to actual owner experience is considerably more complicated than the recommendation to attend them implies.
The researchers are careful not to conclude that obedience classes are without value. The study design cannot determine whether owners attended classes because their dogs already had problems, whether the classes attended varied in quality and method, or whether the absence of an effect on satisfaction reflects a genuine null result or a measurement limitation of the study population. What the data does establish is that class attendance alone, in this sample, did not translate into meaningfully better ownership experience.
The choke chain finding adds a dimension that connects training method to outcome. Aversive training tools associated with punishment-based approaches were linked to higher perceived costs and lower satisfaction — consistent with the broader evidence that coercive training methods tend to increase rather than reduce behavioural problems and owner stress over time.
What This Means for Building a Relationship That Works 🐕
The satisfaction data points toward a practical conclusion that most dog training messaging has not fully internalised: the quality of the owner-dog relationship, as experienced by the owner, is primarily shaped by what the dog does in daily life and how much effort that requires to manage — not by the depth of emotional feeling the owner has for the dog. Love alone does not protect against dissatisfaction when the dog’s behaviour is generating costs that exceed the owner’s capacity to absorb them.
This is the structural reality that NeuroBond addresses directly. Emotional closeness is not a substitute for behavioural stability. A dog whose behaviour is generating daily friction — through aggression, disobedience, or the management demands that problem behaviour creates — is a dog whose owner is operating in a relationship defined primarily by cost rather than connection. The emotional closeness that both parties are capable of is being buried under the weight of that cost.
Reducing perceived ownership costs is not a lower ambition than building emotional connection. For many owners, it is the necessary precondition for connection to become the dominant experience of the relationship. A behaviourally stable dog who is easy to live with and whose behaviour does not generate constant management demands is a dog whose owner has the space, energy, and goodwill to invest in the quality of attunement that makes the relationship genuinely satisfying. The Invisible Leash holds most comfortably when it does not feel like hard work to hold. 🐾
Source: van Herwijnen, I. V., van der Borg, J. A., Naguib, M., & Beerda, B. (2018). Dog ownership satisfaction determinants in the owner-dog relationship and the dog’s behaviour. PLoS ONE. Published September 20, 2018.
