Humans Guided Evolution of Dog Barks

[n2doc]

By Brandon Keim June 23, 2011 | 11:30 am | Categories: Animals


It’s a question that tends to arise when a neighborhood mutt sees a cat at 3 a.m., or if you live in an apartment above someone who leaves their small, yapping dog alone all day: Why do dogs bark so much?

Perhaps because humans designed them that way.

“The direct or indirect human artificial selection process made the dog bark as we know,” said Csaba Molnar, formerly an ethologist at Hungary’s Eotvos Lorand University.

Molnar’s work was inspired by a simple but intriguing fact: Barking is common in domesticated dogs, but infrequent if not downright absent in their wild counterparts. Wild dogs yip and squeal and whine, but rarely produce the repetitive acoustic percussion that is barking. Many people had made that observation, but Molnar and his colleagues were the first to rigorously investigate it.



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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/dog-bark-origins/

[KurtNYC]

1. seems like 2 things going on -- 1 is perhaps some linking between

the 'we want a dog that is a permanent non-threatening puppy with floppy ears and other juvenile characteristics' selective breeding and the higher preference for barking that the research cites.

2 is, I think, our own preference for auditory communication. Both owners AND other dogs are teaching puppies what sounds count, which ones get which reaction. I have known dogs who were not very verbal (?) until they were around other dogs who were. And there are people who reward their dogs for barking either consciously (as in praising their "watchdog") or unconsciously (for example by getting as excited and loud as the dog while yelling at it to stop).

Dogs are fairly good and accurate at mimicking sounds that other dogs make and even some of the sounds that humans make (see youtube talking husky). One of my dogs says "go away" and she sounds like a Valley Girl when she does. It's like "go awaaay" and both of them say some other things, things I have said to them 1000 times, but not very often. I don't encourage it and I never tried to train them to speak but they imitate everything that they can, and then they persist in the behaviors that you reward.

edit to add: the article could have done without the blood-splattered wolf puppy picture. WTF?

[Theo Haffey]

2. Does the same apply to cats?

Do wild cats not meow? I assume they don't.