Why Does My Dog Lick Me - What the Evidence Supports

Four explanations circulate, one has an experiment behind it, and the most repeated one has never been tested on adult pet dogs. Here is the evidence map.

This page is not veterinary advice. Paw Multiverse is not a veterinary practice. We cannot examine, diagnose or treat your animal. There are no medicines here, no doses, no home remedies and no treatment steps, on purpose. If your pet is unwell, has swallowed something, or has changed in a way you cannot explain, ring your vet or your nearest emergency clinic and let them decide. Full disclaimer.

Four explanations, and only one of them has been tested

Search this question and you get the same four answers in the same order: affection, taste, submission, and puppyhood. All four appear on reputable sites. Only one of the four has an experiment behind it that we could find, and it is not the one most people lead with.

That is the useful thing to know before you read any further. Dog licking is a behaviour with a large folk literature and a thin experimental one. What follows separates the two, names who said what, and marks the point where confident writing stops being supported.

The puppyhood origin, and how firm it actually is

The most repeated explanation traces face licking to food solicitation. Alexandra Horowitz, who runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, is quoted by the American Kennel Club describing puppies licking the face and muzzle of their mother when she returns to the den from a hunt, in order to get her to regurgitate for them.

The behaviour is real and well described in wild canids. The step that gets skipped is the one from there to your kitchen. Nothing we could find tests whether an adult dog licking an adult human is running the same motor programme for the same reason, or whether the resemblance is superficial. A behaviour that exists in puppies and a behaviour that exists in adults can look identical and have different causes.

The AKC’s companion article on dogs licking each other’s muzzles goes further still, describing the behaviour in adults as a sign of respect and a well mannered request, and attributing the piece to Nicholas Dodman. Read that article closely and you will notice something worth noticing: it cites no studies at all. It is an experienced clinician’s description, presented as such. That is not nothing. It is also not evidence, and treating it as evidence is how a plausible story becomes an internet fact.

The appeasement reading, and the study that tested it

There is one substantial piece of research in this area and it is worth knowing about, partly because it is good and partly because it does not say quite what people claim it says.

Firnkes, Bartels, Bidoli and Erhard published a study in the Journal of Veterinary Behaviour in 2017 titled Appeasement signals used by dogs during dog to human communication. They ran 116 dogs, all over thirteen months old, through a standardised behavioural test with an unfamiliar human examiner, exposing each dog to a graded set of realistic situations from environmental stimuli through friendly contact to threatening interactions, with leads and muzzles in place for safety.

They counted two signals: lip licking and looking away. The headline finding is that both appeared, and the authors concluded dogs use them to appease their human social companions, which supports the older calming signals framework associated with Turid Rugaas.

The detail underneath is more interesting. Looking away occurred significantly more in socially direct situations, the friendly salutation and the threatening stare. Lip licking behaved similarly but, in the researchers’ own account, did not occur as often as expected during the threatening screaming and physical threat situations. In other words the signal did not scale neatly with how frightening the situation was. If licking were simply a fear response you would expect the opposite.

Two cautions before you apply this to your sofa. The study measured lip licking, meaning a dog licking its own lips, which is not the same act as a dog licking your face or your hands. And a standardised test with an unfamiliar examiner is a long way from a dog greeting the person it lives with. The study is real evidence that licking movements carry social information in dog to human interaction. It is not evidence about what your dog means when it licks your ankle at six in the morning.

Kiss to dismiss, the interpretation nobody quotes

The applied animal behaviourist Patricia McConnell has written about an alternative reading credited to Jennifer Shryock, under the name kiss to dismiss. The proposal is that some face licking functions to increase distance rather than to signal subordination. A polite, relentless, socially unanswerable way of making someone go away.

McConnell illustrates it with her own dog performing submissive rituals while edging towards another dog’s bone, then licking hard enough and long enough that the other dog gave the bone up and left. The submissive display was doing offensive work.

She is careful, and we will be too. Her position is that licking may reflect appeasement, anxiety, ambivalence or simple learned habit at the same time, and that telling these apart is difficult without watching the same dog across many contexts. She also notes that behaviours frequently serve more than one function at once. That is the most honest sentence written about this subject anywhere and it is why this page has no single answer at the top of it.

The practical version: if your dog licks you a great deal at the exact moments you are leaning over it, hugging it, or holding it still, the distance increasing reading deserves at least as much weight as the affection reading. Pet body language covers the other signals that tend to travel with it.

The unromantic possibility, in the dog literature too

The certified applied animal behaviourist Mary Burch, quoted by the American Kennel Club, makes the point that human skin is slightly salty and more so after sweating. Horowitz, in the same article, notes that licking often happens after you have finished a good meal.

This is testable at home in a way none of the social explanations are. If the licking clusters after exercise, after cooking, after eating, or on one particular patch of skin where one particular product goes, you have your answer and it is chemical. If it happens on clean, cool, unremarkable skin at consistent times and in a consistent posture, the social readings get more interesting.

Cat owners will recognise the same structure in the feline version of this question, where the boring explanation also has to be cleared before the interesting ones mean anything.

The evidence, mapped

   EXPLANATION              WHAT BACKS IT           STRENGTH
   ----------------------   ---------------------   ------------

   Food solicitation        Described in wild       Strong for
   inherited from puppy     canids. Horowitz,       canids.
   den behaviour            quoted by AKC.          Untested in
                                                    adult pet dogs.

   Appeasement signalling   Firnkes et al. 2017,    Real study.
   towards humans           n = 116, standardised   Measured lip
                            test. J. Vet. Behav.    licking, not
                                                    licking you.

   Kiss to dismiss,         McConnell, crediting    Observational.
   licking to increase      Shryock. Explicitly     Explicitly
   distance                 offered as one of       offered as
                            several readings.       unresolved.

   Salt and food residue    Burch and Horowitz,     Weak as
   on human skin            quoted by AKC. No       evidence.
                            study cited.            Easy to test
                                                    at home.

   Submission to a          Asserted by AKC         No study
   dominant pack member     sources. No study       cited by any
                            cited anywhere we       source we
                            could reach.            could reach.

   -------------------------------------------------------------
   No experiment we found has tested what a dog means
   when it licks a familiar human's face or hands.
   Anyone stating that flatly is going beyond the record.

Why the dominance explanation is not on this page as a fact

Submission to a higher ranking pack member turns up in most articles on this question, including the AKC’s, where it is attributed to Mary Burch. We have left it in the table above and we are not repeating it in the body text, for a reason worth stating plainly.

The dominance framework as applied to pet dogs rests on old work with captive wolves, and its application to domestic dogs living with people has been heavily criticised within veterinary behaviour for decades. We could not find a study demonstrating that a dog licking a person is enacting rank. Without that, the claim is a framework being applied to a behaviour rather than a finding about the behaviour.

That distinction matters for what you do next. If licking is rank, you might be tempted to respond to it as a status transaction. If licking is appeasement or distance seeking, as the better sourced readings suggest, responding to it as a status transaction is exactly wrong. When the evidence is thin we would rather say so than pick the interpretation that makes for a tidier page.

When licking is worth raising with your vet

None of this is diagnosis, none of it is treatment, and there is nothing here to put on anything. It is a list of changes that justify a phone call, because a change is information a vet can use.

The AKC notes that excessive licking, particularly a dog licking itself, can accompany anxiety, boredom or pain, and can also relate to allergies or other health problems. Its own guidance is to have a vet rule out a physical cause before treating the behaviour as behavioural, and that is the right order.

Worth a call: licking that has started suddenly in a dog that never did it, licking that is hard to interrupt, licking concentrated on one spot of the dog’s own body, licking that has come with any change to the skin or coat, licking that has replaced things the dog used to do, or licking of surfaces and floors rather than of people. Add anything else that changed at the same time, because the combination is more useful to the practice than the licking alone. Before you call the vet covers what to have ready.

People also ask whether being licked is a health risk to them. That is a question for a doctor rather than for a pet website, and we are not going to answer it here.

Where this sits among the other things your dog does

Licking is one signal in a set, and on its own it is close to meaningless. Read alongside the eyes, the ears, the tail and what the dog does next, it starts to carry information.

If your dog watches you steadily as well, the staring question covers the research on that, including a well known study whose criticisms are usually left out. If it shadows you from room to room, following covers what that does and does not indicate. If its head goes sideways when you talk, head tilting has the one experiment that has actually been run on it. Panting and shaking are the two behaviours most often misread as emotional when they are not, and barking at nothing covers what a dog can detect that you cannot.

Pet body language is the page that puts the signals together. If your dog is new, the first thirty days with a puppy sets out what a baseline looks like, and the first forty eight hours with a rescue dog covers the case where you have no history to compare against at all.

Where these facts come from

Every claim above was read on the source named beside it, on 4 August 2026. The den regurgitation account attributed to Alexandra Horowitz, the salty skin point attributed to Mary Burch, the submission claim and the guidance on ruling out physical causes before behavioural ones all come from the American Kennel Club. The respect and polite request framing for muzzle licking between dogs, and the absence of any cited study in it, come from the AKC’s companion article attributed to Nicholas Dodman. The 116 dog study, the two signals measured, the standardised test design, the looking away result and the researchers’ own note that lip licking did not appear as often as expected under the strongest threats come from Companion Animal Psychology’s account of Firnkes, Bartels, Bidoli and Erhard, Journal of Veterinary Behaviour, 2017. The kiss to dismiss reading credited to Jennifer Shryock, the bone example, and the caution that licking may serve several functions at once come from Patricia McConnell. Where an explanation had no source behind it, it is marked as unsourced in the table rather than written up as a fact.