SPEAK!...

What Do Those Barks Mean? To Dogs, It's All Just Talk.......

The popular understanding of dog barking is almost like a silly riddle: Why do dogs bark? Because they can.

    : But a small band of researchers around the world, trying to separate fact from speculation, are finding that dogs almost always bark for a reason, even if that reason isn't apparent to humans.

     The bark has evolved into a complicated means of communication between dogs and, potentially, between dogs and people, say a group of animal behaviorists, or ethologists, that includes Dr. Dorit Feddersen-Petersen at Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel, Germany.

     Most wild canids, including wolves, dogs' nearest relatives, bark as a form of close-range communication, researchers say. The wolf's bark ó one of a number of basic vocal sounds, including hauntingly harmonic howls ó is short, low-pitched and gruff, often described as "noisy" because it lacks harmonic or tonal qualities identified with more musical vocalizations. The bark is usually associated with defense of den or pups, a warning to back off, a protest, threat or an actual attack, Dr. Feddersen-Petersen said.

     By comparison, dogs are virtuoso barkers, capable of flights of sonic fancy. Dog barks can be noisy, harmonic or a combination of the two, depending on their context and purpose, said Dr. Feddersen-Petersen.

     Last year in The Archives of Animal Breeding, an international journal, she published the results of a study comparing vocalizations in 11 European wolves and 84 dogs from nine breeds, including poodles, Weimaraners, American Staffordshire terriers, German shepherds, Alaskan malamutes, bull terriers and Kleiner M¸nsterl”nders. The results, she reported, graphically portray how different barks express different emotions, including loneliness, fear, distress, stress and pleasure, as well as a need for care among puppies ó and serve to alert other dogs, people or animals to changing external circumstances.

     "This work on barking is extremely careful and extremely important because it calls attention to the complex social life of dogs that we have barely begun to comprehend," said Dr. Marc Bekoff, an ethologist at the University of Colorado, who studies canids and cognition in animals.

Noisy barks, Dr. Feddersen-Petersen explained, relate to "defensive and offensive threats, social insecurity, physical distress." Harmonic barks, however, are used as a signal for social play, in active and passive submission to another dog or person and when making social contact.

     Dr. Feddersen-Petersen speculated that during domestication dogs "evolved new sound units, their vocal communication got much more important for conflict solving, establishing a social state and other demands of social life."

    Dr. Michael W. Fox, a bioethicist with the Humane Society of the United States, who has conducted studies of dog and wild canid vocalizations, said free-ranging dogs he had studied on a wildlife preserve in southern India had separate barks for elephants, humans, monkeys, other dogs and strange cats. Dr. Feddersen-Petersen agreed that dogs were capable of such feats and more. "Dogs call individual dogs with individual barks," she said. "There are many interesting facts 'sleeping' in our dogs' vocalizations."