Every year, more than 4.5 million people in the United States are bitten by dogs. Nearly half of those bites involve children, and according to the Insurance Information Institute, dog bite liability claims cost homeowners' insurers nearly $1.86 billion in 2025 alone. And yet, most of the assessments used to determine whether a dog is "dangerous" happen in a kennel, on a single day, using tests with little scientific backing.
A commentary published in March 2026 in the journal Animals by researchers at the University of Lincoln is making the case that we've been looking at this wrong all along. The real issue goes beyond the assessment method, to where the assessment happens and what it ignores: the home.
The Problem with Point-in-Time Assessments
For decades, behavioral evaluations for dog bite cases have relied on what researchers now call "point-in-time" testing. A dog is placed in an unfamiliar kennel environment. A rubber hand is inserted into its food bowl. A 20-minute assessment follows, and from that snapshot, a decision is made, sometimes about whether the dog lives or dies.
The researchers behind the new framework are clear about the problem: these evaluations have "very limited ability to predict how a dog will actually behave once rehomed." Out of 37 screening factors routinely used by rehoming staff, only four were evidentially supported as associated with human safety risk. And yet this approach continues to be used in legal proceedings across the country.
Helen Howell, PhD, one of the authors of the commentary, frames the core issue plainly:
A Framework Built on Where Dogs Actually Live
The alternative the Lincoln team proposes draws from forensic psychology, specifically from structured professional judgment (SPJ), the same methodology used to assess risk of human reoffending. Applied to dogs, the SPJ framework identifies 24 risk factors across four domains: the dog's history and prior behavior, current clinical status, the pet parent's household and management practices, and their capacity to implement risk reduction strategies.
Critically, this framework treats the home environment as central, not secondary. Pain is explicitly named as "one of the most pervasive and most underrecognized contributors to human-directed aggression." Dogs mask discomfort well. By the time a bite occurs, the dog may have been living with unmanaged pain for months, something a 20-minute kennel test is virtually guaranteed to miss.
This matters for every vet team. As Todd Hogue, PhD, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Lincoln, explains:
The implications go beyond legal proceedings. For veterinary teams and pet parents alike, this research reinforces a simple truth: animals don't behave the same way in a clinical or kennel setting as they do at home. Fear, stress, unfamiliar smells, and restraint all influence behavior in ways that have nothing to do with how a dog acts during a normal Tuesday afternoon on the couch.
Brief behavioral screening questions can help surface risks early: Has your dog's behavior changed recently? Any reluctance to be handled? Any stiffness or changes in movement? These questions open conversations about pain and home context that a point-in-time kennel test never could, and treating a previously calm dog's new reactivity as a possible pain signal, rather than a behavior problem, is often the more accurate read.
What a vet observes in the exam room may simply not reflect how a pet behaves at home, which is exactly why context-appropriate care in the home environment gives anxious or reactive patients a more accurate picture than a single clinic visit can. The same gap shows up with cats and the stress response a clinic visit triggers before the exam even starts, and it's the kind of problem at-home veterinary care exists to close.