Dog Behavior: Why Dogs Bark
A Look at Barking From the Dog's Point of View
Dogs are said to bark for different reasons in various situations and under diverse conditions. For instance, a dog may bark when she hears a noise outside and the family is home, suggesting that she does it to alert her humans of danger. But she may also bark when she hears a noise while no one’s home. Who is the dog alerting then? Some dogs will also bark at another dog during play. This often seems to be done to get the other dog to play harder or with more intensity. This is clearly much different from a dog who supposedly barks to alert her family of danger. However, in this article I’ll identify 12 different situations where dogs bark, and offer a single underlying cause for all of them.
12 Types of Barking, 1 Underlying Cause
First, I think it's important to understand that most scientific explanations for animal behavior—including why dogs bark—are modeled either on a) the properties of instincts and genetics or b) higher cognitive faculties such as reason, logic and language. For some reason, scientists feel that the role emotion plays in animal behavior “is not well understood,” so they rarely, if ever, attempt to explain behavior through feelings and emotions. This tendency is beginning to change thanks to work done by neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp and others. But as Dr. David Mech has pointed out, science is slow to change. So most studies on animal behavior still focus on intellect or instinct rather than emotion.
In the meantime, if we look at the brains of mammals we see three distinct processing units. A comparative analysis of the dog and human brain shows little differentiation in size or shape between the older parts of the brain, the reptilian complex—relating to instincts—and the limbic system—relating to emotion.
Meanwhile, in the more evolved part of the brain, the neo-cortex, the differences between the dog’s brain and the human cortex are immense. This suggests that while dogs and humans share some of the same instincts and emotions, a dog's ability to think and reason—processed in the cortex—is either completely non-existent or extremely limited.
I think it’s important to understand how these aspects of the brain operate because if we want to understand the reason dogs bark (among other things) we have to look at it from their point of view, from inside their brains, so to speak, not ours.
So here are 12 basic situations where dogs bark.
1) Some dogs bark at the sound of the doorbell or strange noises outside, etc.
2) A dog with separation anxiety barks, howls, and whines when left alone.
3) The dog with leash aggression barks at people or other dogs on his walks.
4) Some dogs bark at joggers, cyclists, skateboarders, etc.
5) Dogs will sometimes bark at other dogs during play.
6) A shelter dog barks, seemingly to protest being locked up.
7) When a dog hears other dogs barking he sometimes joins in.
8) A puppy barks when he's afraid to go down a set of stairs.
9) A dog barks when frightened by unknown animals (eg. horses) outdoors.
10) Adog barks when his owner tries to get him to do something he doesn’t want to.
11) Some dogs exhibit generalized barking when first coming outdoors.
12) Some dogs barks at statues, toys, the vacuum cleaner, or other inanimate objects.
A Humanesque Analysis
In an article for his blog at PsychologyToday.com, “What Are Dogs Trying to Say When They Bark?” Stanley Coren writes that dogs and other animals use a universal code when communicating vocally, based on three dimensions: pitch, duration, and repetition. Low-pitched sounds indicate threats of aggression while high-pitched sounds indicate friendliness. Longer durations communicate the dog’s intent to stand his ground while shorter durations communicate fear or uncertainty. As for the rate or frequency of barking, Coren says sounds repeated at a fast rate indicate urgency while brief bursts of one or two barks indicate only a mild interest.
Why do low-pitched sounds indicate aggression?
According to Coren it’s because these kinds of sounds tend to come from bigger animals. “Suppose that you are an animal who is sending signals to those around you,” says Coren. “Since you know that other animals are paying attention to the pitch of your signals you can now deliberately use that as a means of communication. If you want to make another animal move away, or to stay out of your territory, you could send a lower pitched signal, like a growl, suggesting that you are larger and more dangerous.”
The bits in bold show where I think Coren’s explanation veers into what cognitive scientists would call “cognitively-rich” rather than “cognitively-lean” explanations.
For instance, do dogs have a sense of self? No dog has passed the “mirror test,” one indicator of self awareness. Another is the presence of von Economo neurons in the brain, which dogs don’t have. This means that if you’re a dog, and you don’t have a sense of self, you can’t have a sense-of-self-and other, meaning that you’d have no way of knowing “that other animals are paying attention to the pitch of your signals.” Without a sense-of-self-and-other a dog would also have no way of attempting to fool other animals into thinking she’s “larger and more dangerous” than she is.
In order for a dog to think the ways Coren describes, a dog would also have to have a fully-developed theory of mind (ToM), requiring an awareness that a) she has senses, b) that she has emotions, and c) that she has a mind. These cognitive abilities then have to be coupled with an ability to know that others animals also have minds, emotions, and senses. A lot of research has been done in recent years to see if dogs have any of these abilities, and there’s no evidence they do.
That said, Coren is not alone in promoting cognitively-rich explanations. It’s very common, and comes from two sources: 1) a selective (i.e., partial) reading of Darwin’s thoughts on the differences between human and animal minds and 2) an instinct humans have which literally forces us to interpret natural phenomena from our own perspective.
There’s no question that dogs are capable of communicating with us and with one another. And barking may be one way do of doing that. But according to cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett, there are two types of communication. The first is the intentional reporting of information, which requires a fully-developed ToM, plus the use of symbolic language, written, spoken, or signed. And while dogs understand our verbal cues, and can pair them with an amazing number of behaviors, they don't have the ability to use and understand language. True, dogs are very expressive, but as far as I know no dog has ever spoken a single word in any language.
The second form of communication only requires that a dog have an ability to express his emotions. So when a dog brings you his leash or digs at an empty water dish, is he intentionally reporting information or is he expressing his desire to go for a walk or his need for water?
High-Level Cognition or Pattern Recognition?
It's helpful to know that, for dogs, understanding and responding to verbal cues takes place primarily through a process called pattern recognition, an evolutionary pre-cursor to logic and language. There is also scientific evidence showing that dogs living in human households are smarter and more capable of understanding what we want them to do, and are better at following our cues, than feralized dogs are. Cognitive scientist Michael Tomasello has said that animals who are “enculturated” with humans show higher levels of cognition than those who aren’t, suggesting that the cognitive abilities of domestic dogs may be the result of embodied embedded cognition, where the cumulative effect of daily dog/human interactions create a kind of Vulcan mind-meld, where our dogs hijack parts of our brains to do some of their thinking for them.
So I’m not saying that dogs don’t have minds. But do you think your dog is aware that he has a mind? Is he aware that other dogs have minds or that you have a mind? Does he know that his mind is different from yours? That’s only a small piece of what’s required for a dog to have a fully-developed theory-of-mind and to thus bark for some of the reasons Dr. Coren has given. This is why I think if we’re to truly understand why dogs bark (or do anything else, for that matter) we can’t rely on humanesque explanations. We have to look at the behavior from the dog’s perspective.
If dogs have a theory of mind, why doesn’t this border collie understand
that the statue of Alan Turing won’t throw the stick for him to chase?
The Ability to Move Well vs. Conscious Intent
Kevin Behan—a former police dog trainer and the inventor of Natural Dog Training—takes what I think is a much more parsimonious, and hence scientific, slant on why dogs bark.
In a 2009 article written for his website, “Why Do Dogs Bark at Strangers,” Behan says that the form of something—the dog’s owner, another dog, even a toy—presents one of two polarities, it can be felt either as potential prey or a potential predator. Things that have a preyful aspect create a kind of emotional magnetism causing the dog to feel an emotional and physical attraction toward them. Meanwhile, predatory energy is electric, creating feelings of resistance. In simplest terms feelings of attraction cause a dog to move toward something while feelings of resistance motive a dog to move away.
If you’ve ever seen a dog running back to his owner as fast as possible, that’s pure attraction. If you see dog moving away from his owner, that’s resistance (and the dog probably has a mean owner). Meanwhile, a dog who moves toward his owner in a curvilinear fashion is feeling a mixture of attraction and resistance. Another example is that the feeling of chasing prey objects has a pleasurable, magnetic quality, engendering feelings of attraction and an unobstructed emotional flow, while things like strange men wearing hats, large unfamiliar animals suddenly appearing, or even a flight of stairs when seen from the top step (common in puppies), stimulate feelings of fear and resistance, reducing the dog’s emotional flow.
The first priority of all living organisms is the have the capacity to move toward things that provide sustenance and the capacity to move away from things that are harmful. Even the jellyfish—one of the simplest of all organisms—has the capacity to move toward its prey. It doesn’t have a brain or even a nervous system, yet it somehow has the capacity to move toward things that provide food energy.
Another thing to to consider is that any obstruction to a dog’s physical movement is felt as a loss of momentum, which, if unpleasant enough, will cause the dog to bark. For instance, two dogs are playing a game of chase. One stops to sniff something. His feelings of attraction have shifted away from his partner to what he’s sniffing. If the second dog has no interest in sniffing, he may just stand there, or he may start barking. While Coren (and most of the rest of us) would interpret his vocalizations as an intentional form of expression, it could also be explained as the result of a sudden loss of the pleasurable feeling of running, which is to say an interruption to his physical momentum and, by extension, his feelings of emotional flow. A clearer example is the dog who finds himself caged at an animal shelter. Most shelters are noisy places. Why? Because the dogs are trying to comunicate to the staff that they want their freedom? Or because they feel that their natural ability to move freely through space has been obstructed?
Human beings have these same feelings. You’re hungry, so you go to the supermarket or a favorite restaurant, but find long lines at the registers, or that the restaurant is full. You’re driving on a two-lane road, in a hurry to get to work, but find some idiot ahead of you driving at 40 miles an hour and you can’t pass him. Whether we’re aware of it or not, these feelings of blocked needs and desires—in other words, our desire to connect to things we’re attracted to—are felt in the body as a sudden lack of physical momentum.
Some of these ideas may not make sense to you. Some may not. Maybe none of them do. But they make much more sense than the idea that your dog has a humanlike awareness of his own mental capacity as well as the mental capacities of others.
Watch the video of the border collie above. According to Coren, border collies are the most intelligent breed of dog. If this is true, why can’t this smartest of dogs distinguish between a statue and a living human being? And is he barking to communicate his desire for the statue to throw the stick or is he barking because he has a strong desire for unobstructed movement that’s temporarily being frustrated?
Why Dogs Bark
The doorbell rings. The dog barks and races toward the door or spins around in circles, runs back to the owner then back to the door, etc.
A puppy climbs a set of stairs for the first time and is exhilarated by the experience. But once at the top he looks back down and barks in a kind of panic.
Dogs bark at each other during play.
These things look to us like very different circumstances, so we supply humanesque reasons for them: a dog alerts its owner to danger, a puppy barks to get his owner to carry him down the stairs, dogs who bark while playing are acting dominant.
In every case (including all 12 examples listed up top) the dog barks because something interrupts his flow of feelings, causing him to feel as if he’s losing his physical and emotional equilibrium. This happens whether the dog is already moving, standing perfectly still, or resting comfortably. That's because any blocked or interrupted feeling of attraction, need for social connection, even a desire that goes unfulfilled, is felt by the dog as a sudden lack of momentum, which is virtually the same thing as fear.
Going back to the videos above, the doorbell stimulates a sudden electric reaction in the Pomeranian. She barks and races back and forth to reacquire feelings of physical and emotional balance. The puppy stuck at the top of the stairs feels panicked because he wants desperately to re-connect with his owner but is terrified of falling (the ultimate feeling of physical and emotional dis-equilibrium). The dogs who bark during play do so because the other dog isn't moving fast enough to keep the feeling of flow going.
I think these feelings are something that dogs and humans share. The feeling of moving through space can be either pleasurable or frustrating, depending on the situation or even our mood. When we’re in a good mood, there’s a spring in our step. When we’re in a bad mood, every step we take can feel like a chore. And just as when our pleasurable feelings of momentum are frustrated or interfered with—like being cut off in traffic, or when we have to wait in a long line, or when we come home after a long day to find the elevator is out of order—it can put us in a bad mood and make us a little snappish.
“Don’t bark at me,” our significant other might say. “I had to climb the stairs too!”
So on a certain level, dogs and humans aren’t that different after all.
Next time: How to keep your dog from barking.
LCK
“Life Is an Adventure—Where Will Your Dog Take You?”
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