Up-Casting(Super Type Casting) vs Down Casting(SubType Casting)

Up-casting is casting to a supertype, while downcasting is casting to a subtype. Supercasting is always allowed, but subcasting involves a type check and can throw a ClassCastException.

In your case, a cast from from Dog to an Animal is a upcast, because a Dog is-a Animal. In general, you can upcast whenever there is an is-a relationship between two classes.

Downcasting would be something like this:

Animal animal = new Dog();
Dog castedDog = (Dog) animal;