Do dogs make friends at daycare?

The clearest evidence comes from play. In 2015, Elisabetta Palagi and colleagues filmed 49 dogs playing at a dog park in Palermo, Italy, and timed how quickly each dog mirrored its partner's play bow or relaxed open-mouth face. Owners sorted every pair as friends, acquaintances or strangers, with friends defined as dogs that lived together or played together at least three times a week. Mirroring within a second was most frequent between friends, less common between acquaintances and rarest between strangers.

The same study found that play sessions punctuated by that rapid copying lasted longer than sessions with signals alone. A separate 2015 study in Scientific Reports gave dogs a tray they could pull to deliver food to another dog. Dogs did it for a familiar partner from their own household, and not for a stranger. Neither study proves that dogs feel friendship the way people do, but both show dogs treating known dogs as individuals rather than as interchangeable company.

The friend category in the Palermo study required contact at least three times a week, and that lines up with how daycare friendships form: the same dogs, in the same group, on the same days. At Dogtown every dog is placed after the free evaluation, held on weekdays between 6:30 and 9:30 AM, into a group of 7 to 10 dogs matched by size, play style and temperament. Keeping that group steady is what gives a dog the repeat meetings that turn a stranger into a regular.

Matching also protects friendships from the wrong kind of play. Two dogs who adore each other but differ hugely in size, or who wind each other up until the game turns sharp, do better as friends with breaks than as partners all day, and our team watches pairs as well as the group. The Gloucester Dog Park at Stage Fort Park is a fine place to run, with separate small-dog and large-dog areas, but the mix of dogs changes with every visit, which makes that kind of familiarity harder to build.