Read Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know Online

Authors: Alexandra Horowitz

Tags: #General, #Dogs, #Science, #Life Sciences, #Psychology, #Cognitive Psychology, #Dogs - Psychology, #Pets, #Zoology, #Breeds

Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (15 page)

BOOK: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
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There are a handful of distinguishable barks, used reliably in a handful of distinguishable cases. Dogs bark to get attention, to warn of danger, in fear, as a greeting, in play, or even out of loneliness, anxiety, confusion, distress, or discomfort. The meaning is in the context of their use, but not only in the context: spectrograms of dog barks show that they are mixtures of the tones used in growls, in whimpers, and in yelps. By altering the prevalence of one tone over the others, the bark takes on a different character—a different gist.
Early research into dogs' vocalizations concluded that all dog barking was attention-getting barking. In fact they do attract attention, assuming someone is close enough to hear them. But recent studies have made more subtle discriminations between barks. While in some way all barks come down to some manner of "attention-getting," one might as well say that we speak in order to be heard: true, but incomplete. For instance, when experimenters analyzed the spectrograms of thousands of dog barks during one of three contexts—a stranger ringing the doorbell, being locked outside, or in play—they found three distinct types of barks.
Stranger barks
were the lowest in pitch and the harshest: they are nearly spat out. Less variable than the other types, stranger barks are well designed to send a message over a distance, something necessary if caught in a threatening situation alone. They can also be combined into "superbarks," concatenations of barks that together last much longer than the duration of barking in other contexts. The end result is a bark that most human listeners find to be aggressive.
The
isolation
barks
tended to be higher-frequency and more variable: some ranged from loud to soft and back again, some went from high to low. These barks are lobbed into the air one by one, sometimes with great intervals between them. They sound "fearful," people tend to say.
Play barks,
too, are high-frequency, but they happen more often one after the other than the isolation barks. They're directed at someone else, unlike isolation barks: at a dog or human playmate. There is considerable individual variation, of course: not every dog barks alike. The stranger bark of a small dog may come out as
rar, rar
or
raoaw, raoaw,
while a larger dog emits a capital-r
Rumph.
These differences between bark types make evolutionary sense: the lowest sounds are used in threatening situations (again to appear bigger); higher sounds are entreaties—to friends, for companionship—and as such are submissive requests, not warnings. Differences between individual barkers indicate that barks might be used to affirm a dog's identity, or reveal an association with a group (even the group
me
and the woman at the end of my leash,
rather than
these dogs I'm frolicking among
). And barking together with others may be a form of social cohesion. Barking can be contagious, like the howl: one dog barking might prompt a chorus of barking dogs, all joined in their shared noisiness.
BODY AND TAIL

When we approached people on the street, Pump set all her senses to looking; if she recognized them, her head would lower ever so slightly—looking up coyly as though over reading glasses—and she would wag her tail low. This was quite different from her approach of a dog she was smitten with: all upright, tail high, posture impeccable, wags soldierlike in their rhythm—or a dog friend—a looser,

janglier approach, and even an open-mouthed grab toward their face, or a gentle bump with her hip along their body.

You may be sitting down right now, folded into a comfy chair—or perhaps you're standing, straphanging on a train to work, book scrunched against another commuter's back. Most likely you don't
mean
anything by your sitting or standing, or when you walk or lie supine: it's just a posture of convenience or comfort. But in other contexts our very posture conveys information. A catcher crouches: he's prepared for a pitch. A parent crouches and opens his arms: he's inviting a child for a hug. Running when someone you know approaches, you suddenly stop and greet them; standing still when someone you know approaches, you suddenly turn and run. There can be meaning simply in the vigor or slouch of your body. For an animal with a limited vocal repertoire, posture is ever more important. And it appears that dogs use specific postures to make very specific statements.
There is a language of the body, formed of phonemes made from rumps, heads, ears, legs, and tails. Dogs know how to translate this language intuitively; I learned it after watching hundreds of hours of dogs interacting with each other. We must look like such stiffs to dogs, who can express everything from playfulness to aggression to amorous intent by changing the shape of their body and its altitude. By contrast, we are inhibited straight-backeds, mostly stationary or traveling forward with little excess movement. Occasionally—heavens—we turn a head or arm flamboyantly to the side.
But man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master.—Charles Darwin
For dogs, posture can announce aggressive intent or shrinking modesty. To simply stand erect, at full height, with head and ears up, is to announce readiness to engage, and perhaps to be the prime mover in the engagement. Even the hair between the shoulders or at the rump—the
hackles
—may be standing at attention, serving not just as a visual signal of arousal but also releasing the odor of the skin glands at the base of the hairs. To exaggerate the whole effect, a dog might stand not just up but
over
another dog, head or paws on his back. That's about as declarative a statement as you can make that you are feeling dominant. The opposite body posture, crouching with head down, ears down, and tail tucked away, is submissive. To lie all the way down and expose the belly is even more so.*
This principle of
antithesis
—that opposing postures communicate opposing emotions—describes much of the expressive scope of dogs. Facial expressions, most visible in the mouth and ears, mind this principle, too. The mouth sweeps from closed to open and relaxed, to open with lips raised, snout wrinkled, and teeth bared. A dog's "grin," with jaw closed, is submissive; as the mouth is opened, the arousal increases; and if the teeth are exposed, the look gets aggressive. Coming full circle, a wide-open mouth with teeth mostly covered—a yawn—is not a sign of boredom, as often assumed by analogy with our own yawning; instead, it may indicate anxiety, timidity, or stress, and is used by dogs to calm themselves or others. The ears can also go through these gymnastics: they can be pricked, relaxed and down, or folded tightly along the head. Eyeballing another dog directly can be threatening or aggressive; by contrast, looking away is submissive—an attempt to quell one's own anxiety and the other dog's arousal. In other words, in each case there is a range from one extreme to another, representing variation in intensity along an emotional continuum, from relaxed to aroused in fear or alarm.
None of these is a static symbol—or, if it is, its being static is meaningful. Holding an erect posture, motionless, is a quiet way of putting an exclamation point on the posture. It exaggerates the tenseness of the communication. For the most part, postures are taken, and moved through. The tail, especially, is a limb of movement. It is to science's great discredit that no one has done a thorough investigation of the meaning of every wag of the dog's tail.
As a puppy her tail was trim, an arrow of soft black fur. This turned out not to be the destiny of her tail at all: it grew into an incredible banner of a tail, with extravagant feathering that matted and gathered leaves. It was bent at the tip from a disagreement with a car door when she was young. She brandished it when excited or delighted, curved to a sickle with the tip pointing at her back. When lying down, she drummed it happily on the ground at my approach. Her tail registered her exhaustion in a low-hanging straight pose; her disinterest in a nosy dog by tucking between her legs. Most of the time as we walked together, it hung loosely down, curving jauntily toward its tip, and merrily swished to and fro. I loved to approach her slowly, stalking her, and prompt her tail to quiver into wagging.

One of the difficulties in deciphering the language of tails is the great variation in tails among dogs. The flamboyant plumage of a golden retriever contrasts mightily with the tight corkscrew of the pug. Dogs wear tails long and rigid, stumpy and curled, hanging heavily or perpetually perked. The wolf tail is in some ways an average of the various breed tails: it is a long, slightly feathered tail, held naturally slightly down. Early ethologists who did a reckoning of wolf tail postures identified at least thirteen different tail carriages, conveying thirteen distinguishable messages. As per the antithesis thesis, tails held high indicate confidence, self-assertion, or excitement from interest or aggression, while low-hanging tails indicate depression, stress, or anxiety. An erect tail also exposes the anal region, allowing a bold dog to air his odor signature. By contrast, a long tail held so low as to curl back between the legs, closing off the rump, is actively submissive and fearful. When a dog is simply waiting around, his tail is relaxed, hanging low, dropped down but not rigid. A tail gently lifted is a sign of mild interest or alertness.

But it is not as simple as tail height, for the tail is not just held, it is wagged. Wagging does not translate as simple happiness. A high, stiffly wagging tail can be a threat, especially when accompanied by an erect posture. Quickly wagging a dropped, low tail is another sign of submission. This is the tail of the dog who has just been caught finishing off the last of your shoes. The vigor of the wag is roughly indicative of the intensity of the emotions. A neutral tail wagging lightly is interested but tentative. A loose, lively whisking tail accompanies the noseled search for a ball lost in high grasses or an odor trail discovered on the ground. The familiar happy wag is incredibly different from all of these: the tail is held above or out from the body and strongly draws rough arcs in the air behind it. Unmistakable delight. Even non-wagging is meaningful: dogs tend to still their tails when attending carefully to a ball in your hand or waiting for you to tell them what's happening next.
Researchers interested in the brain of the dog accidentally discovered something about the tail of the dog along the way: the dog wags asymmetrically. On average, dogs' wags tend more strongly to the right when they suddenly see their owners—or even anything else of some interest: another person, or a cat. When presented with an unfamiliar dog, dogs still wag—more that tentative wag than the happy wag—but tending to the left. You might not be able to see this in your own dog unless you watch them wag in slow-motion video playback (which I highly recommend)—or unless your dog is one of those who wag less back-and-forth than round-and-round, inclining to the side. Consider yourself lucky to be wagged at with such clear-cut enthusiasm.
Pump does a full-body shake: it starts in her head and rolls down her body, shimmering out through her tail. It is like a punctuation mark that has yet to be discovered. She shakes to end an episode, when she's unsure, and sometimes when she's just ambling along.
The dog uses his body expressively: communication writ through movement. Even the moments between interactions are marked by movement: as when a dog does a full-body shake, his skin twisting over his frame, to indicate his finishing one activity and moving on to another. Not all dogs have hackles that visibly raise with pique, long tails to ostentatiously wag, or ears that raise with interest. The fabulously ropy-furred komondor approaches other dogs with what we must assume is his head, but neither eyes nor ears are visible underneath his long locks. In breeding dogs to have particular looks that we find agreeable, we are limiting their possibilities for communicating. Just as we might expect, but would rather not confront, a dog with a docked tail has, thereby, a docked repertoire of things he can say.
BOOK: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
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