Temperament testing a dog involves presenting a series of controlled stimuli and observing how the dog reacts to each one. Whether you’re evaluating a litter of puppies, assessing an adult rescue dog, or preparing for a formal certification, the core approach is the same: expose the dog to social, sensory, and physical challenges in a neutral environment and watch for confidence, fear, recovery, and willingness to engage. Here’s how the major testing methods work and how to conduct them yourself.
Testing Puppies: The Volhard Aptitude Test
The most widely used puppy temperament test is the Volhard Puppy Aptitude Test, designed to be administered at exactly 49 days old, when puppies are neurologically developed enough for the results to be meaningful but haven’t yet been heavily shaped by individual experiences. The test has 10 subtests, each targeting a different behavioral trait. You’ll need a quiet, unfamiliar area with no distractions, a crumpled paper ball, a metal spoon and pan, a small towel with string attached, and a collapsible umbrella.
The 10 subtests are:
- Social attraction: Place the puppy on the ground four feet away from you and coax it toward you. This measures how drawn the pup is to people.
- Following: Stand up and walk away while encouraging the puppy verbally. You’re looking at willingness to follow a person’s lead.
- Restraint: Gently roll the puppy onto its back and hold it there for 30 seconds. This reveals how the pup responds to being physically controlled.
- Social dominance: Sit the puppy facing you at a 45-degree angle, stroke it, and bring your face close. You’re gauging how forgiving and accepting the pup is of close human contact.
- Elevation: Cradle the puppy under its belly with your fingers interlaced and lift it just off the ground for 30 seconds. This tests the pup’s response to being in a position where it has no control.
- Retrieving: Get the puppy’s attention with a crumpled paper ball, toss it four feet away, then back up and encourage the pup to bring it back. Retrieving drive correlates strongly with success in guide dog work, obedience, and field trials.
- Touch sensitivity: Take the webbing between the toes of one front paw and press gradually between your finger and thumb, increasing pressure on a scale of 1 to 10. Stop the moment the puppy pulls away or shows discomfort. The threshold tells you how sensitive the dog will be to physical corrections or handling.
- Sound sensitivity: Place the puppy in the center of the area and strike a metal spoon sharply against a metal pan twice from a few feet away. Watch whether the pup startles, recovers, investigates, or cowers.
- Chase instinct: Drag a towel on a string across the floor in front of the puppy. This measures prey drive and interest in moving objects.
- Stability: Hold a closed umbrella four feet from the puppy, pointed perpendicular to its line of sight, then open it and set it on the ground so the pup can investigate. This tests how the dog processes something strange and novel.
For each subtest, score the puppy’s response on a scale of 1 (most assertive or dominant) to 6 (most passive or fearful). A puppy that charges at the umbrella and bites it scores very differently from one that approaches cautiously and sniffs, or one that runs to the far corner. Patterns across all 10 tests give you a behavioral profile: mostly 1s and 2s suggest a bold, potentially challenging dog that needs an experienced owner; mostly 3s and 4s indicate a well-balanced, adaptable temperament; mostly 5s and 6s point to a timid dog that may need extra socialization and patience.
Assessing an Adult Dog
Adult dogs bring a history of experiences that puppies don’t have, so testing them requires a broader lens. The Clothier Animal Response Assessment Tool (CARAT) is one of the most thorough frameworks available, measuring traits across several categories: core traits like arousal level, resilience, and energy; social traits like sociability, tolerance of other animals, and how the dog uses personal space; interactive traits like patience and biddability (how responsive the dog is to direction from both familiar and unfamiliar people); and awareness traits covering how the dog processes visual, auditory, physical, and scent-based information.
CARAT also evaluates persistence, which is how long a dog fixates on something it has noticed. A dog with high visual persistence will lock onto a squirrel and be nearly impossible to redirect. A dog with high auditory persistence may continue reacting to a sound long after it’s stopped. These persistence traits, combined with predatory chase persistence, help predict how manageable a dog will be in real-world environments. The assessment rounds out with complex traits: social confidence (comfort around people and animals), environmental confidence (comfort in new places and situations), and self-modulation (the dog’s ability to calm itself down after becoming excited or stressed).
You don’t need the formal CARAT certification to borrow its framework. Observe how your dog responds to new people approaching, unfamiliar surfaces, sudden noises, other animals at a distance, and novel objects. Note not just the initial reaction but the recovery. A dog that startles at a loud noise but approaches to investigate within a few seconds is showing resilience. A dog that remains cowered or continues barking for minutes is showing poor recovery, which is one of the most telling indicators of future behavioral problems.
Testing for Resource Guarding
Resource guarding, where a dog becomes defensive over food, toys, or resting spots, is one of the most important behaviors to assess, especially in shelter or rescue dogs. The standard method uses a fake hand (sometimes called an assess-a-hand) on a stick to approach the dog while it’s eating from a bowl. The fake hand allows the tester to simulate reaching toward the food without risking a bite.
Start by letting the dog eat undisturbed for several seconds. Then slowly move the fake hand toward the bowl. A dog with no guarding tendency will continue eating, glance up, or move aside. A dog with mild guarding may freeze, eat faster, or shift its body to block the bowl. More serious guarding shows up as a hard stare, a low growl, a lip curl, or snapping at the hand. Shelters also sometimes test reactions to a life-sized doll or stuffed figure resembling a small child, since guarding behavior can escalate around smaller, less predictable family members. Keep in mind these tests use inanimate objects that provide no behavioral cues back to the dog, so results represent a baseline rather than a perfect prediction of real-life interactions.
Formal Temperament Certifications
If you want an official evaluation, two organizations offer structured tests with pass/fail results.
The American Kennel Club Temperament Test (ATT) is a noncompetitive, pass/fail evaluation open to all breeds. It draws from six stimulus categories: social, auditory, visual, tactile, proprioceptive (balance and body awareness), and unexpected. Each test session uses 18 items, three from each category. Two items are required in every test: walking on a wire grate (an exercise pen laid flat on the ground) and reacting to an umbrella being opened nearby. The remaining items are selected from options like a handheld vacuum cleaner being turned on, a plastic bottle filled with coins being shaken, streamers waved on a stick, walking across a crumpled plastic tarp, navigating low cavaletti bars, and a person stepping out from behind a screen wearing unusual clothing or using a walker. A dog earns the ATT title after passing twice under two different evaluators.
The American Temperament Test Society (ATTS) runs a similar field evaluation. A dog automatically fails if it shows unprovoked aggression, obvious avoidance, or panic without recovery. Dogs that are uncontrollable, extremely fearful, or overly aggressive are excluded from testing entirely.
Setting Up a Home Test
You can assemble a basic temperament testing kit with household items. For auditory stimuli, fill a gallon plastic jug with about 20 coins. A handheld vacuum, a loud whistle, or a bulb-type bike horn also work. For visual stimuli, use a standard umbrella, a rolling suitcase or wagon, and streamers taped to a stick. For tactile challenges, lay down a plastic tarp, a wire exercise pen opened flat, or a piece of lattice over a folded blanket. For proprioceptive tests, set up low hurdles using cones and dowels, lay hula hoops on the ground in an overlapping pattern, or create a simple teeter-totter from a two-and-a-half by four foot piece of plywood balanced on a halved pool noodle.
For unexpected stimulus tests, have someone step out from behind a car, a pop-up canopy, or a doorway carrying an unusual object like a large stuffed animal, a folding chair, or wearing a hat and poncho. The goal isn’t to scare the dog. It’s to see how quickly the dog processes something unfamiliar, whether it approaches or retreats, and how fast it recovers its composure.
What the Results Actually Tell You
Temperament tests are useful snapshots, not crystal balls. A systematic review published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science found widespread inconsistencies in how behavioral tests are designed, scored, and interpreted, along with a general lack of strong reliability and validity data. What a dog does in a controlled test environment may not perfectly match what it does in your living room six months later.
That said, certain patterns are consistently meaningful. Recovery time after a startle is one of the most reliable indicators of underlying fearfulness or confidence. Dogs that bounce back quickly from a sudden noise or strange object tend to handle real-world surprises better. Extremely high or low scores across multiple categories are more predictive than any single test result. A puppy that scores as highly dominant on restraint, elevation, and social dominance is giving you a consistent signal, not a fluke.
The most useful approach is to treat temperament testing as one data point alongside the dog’s known history, breed tendencies, and your own observations over time. Test in a neutral, quiet location the dog hasn’t been to before. Avoid testing when the dog is tired, hungry, or overstimulated. Run through the exercises calmly and without pressure. What you’re looking for isn’t a perfect score. You’re looking for a dog whose natural tendencies match the life you can realistically offer it.