Everyone who's been growled at by a dog knows the sound of this vocal communication. In a non playful way, we know to back off. When we're playing with dogs however, we find the growl to be something totally different.
Dogs are also able to distinguish upon these different growls among different breeds. In the first study where 20 breeds of dogs had their growls recorded and analyzed for differences, there was a significant difference between playful and non-playful growls but not between non-playful growls when a dog defends a piece of food and a growl of a threat approaching.
In a second study, a fresh, irresistible cooked piece of meat was placed in a bowl. 41 adult pet dogs of different breeds approached the piece of food only to have a recorded sound from the previous played back from a hidden speaker. The dogs only reacted and jumped to the recording of a "defending a piece of food" growl and not the stranger threat growl that was analyzed and found no difference between the two.
This finding suggested that there are even deeper things dogs communicate to each other with and lots more remain unknown in this particular field of dog communication.
Source: http://news.discovery.com/animals/dog-growl-communication.html
Posted by Vince Tieu
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Im sure there is a lot of research being done on dogs and dog communication due to their ever increasing popularity as pets. As a dog owner myself you can definitely distinguish a difference between a playful growl and an angry growl. Whats strange to think about is that you as a human do not have to think about which kind of growl it is. Just through context you can tell. What I like about this study is that it takes the visual cues away and simply tests the audio aspect of the communication.
ReplyDeletePatrick Salome
That's really interesting. Do you know what kinds of components of the growls they tested for differences? I wonder if it's anything like what we did with bird songs, like duration, frequency, bandwidth, etc. Also, I'm a little confused by the experiment done with the piece of meat. Were the growl recordings that were used specific to the dog's species?
ReplyDelete-Jane de Verges
I wonder what would happen if a dog's own growl was played back to it. If they can somehow tell the difference between the two growls, defending and stranger-threat, I wonder if they can distinguish between other dogs' growls. Are scientists developing experiments to determine exactly how the dogs can tell the two growls apart, if in initial studies humans can't? Very interesting. Maybe dogs take context into consideration, just like we do when interacting with dogs.
ReplyDeletePosted by Muriel Herd
That is neat, i never thought of growls as having specific meaning. With the information from the article it seams that a dogs growl could be compared to a human yelling at a another. there is a specific message but no matter what message, anger or aggression is displayed.
ReplyDeletePosted by Amber Kapchinske
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ReplyDeleteJane,
ReplyDeleteWhat I understood was that the growls played weren't species specific. Also, I do believe that the measurements they took were similar to what we did with the bird songs.
Posted Vince Tieu