When dogs bark, what are they doing? Are they just talking to one another? No, they have a variety of other sounds and movements more suited to that, some very subtle, and those they share with all dogs and wolves, domestic or not. A dingo from Australia can read the attitude and meaning of the body language of a timber wolf or a beagle. Barking is not generally used for communication between dogs.
More often than not a bark is a warning or heads-up for...for us.
But why do they do that?
The answer seems to be because we designed them that way.
Scientists have recently been studying the phenomenon of barking in dogs based on...
"...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."
We as humans have spent the last 50,000 years hanging around with dogs. It turns out we weren't just throwing Frisbees to them.
We've been encouraging the trait of barking for our own reasons, and whether intentionally or not we've been powerfully applying artificial selection to change the nature of dogs to the point where they now just naturally bark.
And while it maybe be that some dogs seem to bark too much for our modern lifestyles, I think it's easy to come up with reasons why our ancestors' survival could have been greatly aided by a dog that barked upon detecting something that we hadn't yet noticed.
This should not come as a surprise. We've modified just about every plant and animal we have had contact with. There are many, many examples. Ten thousand years ago for instance, there was no corn. We have literally, over the centuries, created it from an ancient grass called teosinte.
More often than not a bark is a warning or heads-up for...for us.
But why do they do that?
The answer seems to be because we designed them that way.
Scientists have recently been studying the phenomenon of barking in dogs based on...
"...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."
We as humans have spent the last 50,000 years hanging around with dogs. It turns out we weren't just throwing Frisbees to them.
We've been encouraging the trait of barking for our own reasons, and whether intentionally or not we've been powerfully applying artificial selection to change the nature of dogs to the point where they now just naturally bark.
And while it maybe be that some dogs seem to bark too much for our modern lifestyles, I think it's easy to come up with reasons why our ancestors' survival could have been greatly aided by a dog that barked upon detecting something that we hadn't yet noticed.
This should not come as a surprise. We've modified just about every plant and animal we have had contact with. There are many, many examples. Ten thousand years ago for instance, there was no corn. We have literally, over the centuries, created it from an ancient grass called teosinte.
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| L to R: teosinte, intermediate hybrid, maize |
I think Carl Sagan illustrated the magnitude of our accomplishments very well in Cosmos:
"Humans have deliberately selected which plants and animals shall live and which shall die for thousands of years. We are surrounded by familiar farm and domestic animals, fruits and trees and vegetables. Where do they come from? Were they once free-living in the wild and then induced to adopt a less strenuous life on the farm? No. They are, almost all of them, made by us."
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