Dog owners and dog lovers have plenty of opinions about which dogs are the best and worst behaved. Some dogs just seem to have more manners than others. Some seem to enjoy stirring up a little trouble.
Pet insurance company Protect My Paws decided to dig a little deeper to determine which dog breeds are the best and worst behaved. They did a study of 87,886 Instagram hashtags in posts about different dog breeds around the world. The study is titled Mischievous Mutts, and Protect My Paws considers it to be an ultimate naughty or nice list for dogs.
Protect My Paws looked at hashtags like #gooddog, #baddog and #muddydog. They tried to determine the dog breeds that got the most praise for being properly trained and the ones that seemed to like getting into trouble.
The naughtiest dog breeds based on percentage of bad hashtags are as follows:
- Japanese Spitz – 86.67 percent
- Shichon – 78.38 percent
- Mudi – 77.27 percent
- Cockapoo – 76.55 percent
- Wirehaired Vizsla – 76.19 percent
- Chug – 76 percent
- Poochon – 75.81 percent
- Welsh Terrier – 74.29 percent
- Keeshond – 73.08 percent
- English Springer Spaniel – 72.83 percent
The best-behaved dog breeds based on the percentage of good hashtags include:
- Korean Jindo – 75.86 percent
- Perro do Presa Canario – 72.73 percent
- Rhodesian Ridgeback – 71.05 percent
- Black Mouth Cur – 70.83 percent
- Portuguese Water Dog – 70.83 percent
- Anatolian Shepherd Dog – 68.97 percent
- Rat Terrier – 68.18 percent
- Belgian Malinois – 67.9 percent
- Miniature Pinscher – 66.67 percent
- Dutch Shepherd – 65.91 percent
Protect My Paws also looked at which countries seem to have the naughtiest and most well-behaved dogs. South Africa seems to have the naughtiest dogs, as 87.85 percent of Instagram posts about dogs are negative. Meanwhile, Moscow, Russia is the city with the best-behaved dogs, as Instagram posts are 98.41 percent positive.
The study also found that Canberra, Australia had the naughtiest dogs, as the Instagram hashtags were 99.74 percent negative. Dogs in Ukraine seem to be quite well behaved, as 96.72 percent of Instagram hashtags implied good behavior.
In the U.S., dog owners in 47 of 50 states think their dogs are very well behaved. Unfortunately, owners in Kansas and North Carolina gave their dogs bad reviews, based on the hashtags used. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, just 44.02 percent of the hashtags were negative, while the rest were more positive.