Beyond Direct Touch: Passive Canine Presence Is Associated with Lower Anxiety in South American University Students

University students are experiencing increasing levels of anxiety, attracting interest in accessible strategies that support wellbeing within educational settings. Animal-assisted interventions have shown beneficial effects on stress and anxiety in students. However, most studies have focused on direct and active interactions with dogs rather than their passive presence. This quasi-experimental study evaluated whether the presence of a dog during regular classroom activities was associated with reduced anxiety among university students. A total of 127 undergraduate students from Veterinary Medicine and Law programs at a Chilean university participated in a repeated-measures pretest–posttest design. State and trait anxiety were assessed before and after class using the Spanish version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). Students attending classes with a dog present reported significantly lower state anxiety (0.300 ± 0.116 vs. 0.384 ± 0.139; p < 0.001) and trait anxiety (0.257 ± 0.140 vs. 0.352 ± 0.155; p < 0.001) than students in control classrooms (no dog present). Mixed-design repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed significant Time × Exposure interactions for both State Anxiety and Trait Anxiety, indicating different temporal anxiety trajectories between exposed and control students. These findings suggest that the passive presence of a trained dog may contribute to lower anxiety levels in university students and could represent a simple, feasible and low-resource wellbeing strategy, particularly relevant for higher education institutions in the context of Latin America and other Global South regions.