You ever play tug of war with your dog and it gets so riled up it starts growling? Or how about when you go to grab its bone? A dogs growl can be pretty intimidating. My dog Stryder is a 115lb male pure bread Golden Retriever, just adorable, but when he growls you quickly realize that's a big dog growling at me. Now he's a protective dog over my families house and family members so when another dog comes in our yard he goes on the defensive, but little did I know that his growl tells other dogs a lot more things than I could have thought of.
Recent studies have found that dogs barks are far more complex to the human ear. Now that may sound like an erroneous statement, but scientist have found that dogs receive special information from the god that is growling, something that has never been found before. The three test that were used to see if dogs growls really were different had the dogs growling during play (while playing tug-of-war), while a stranger approached and while guarding a large meaty bone. These growls showed the scientist many things, such as confirming that a dogs growl tells the listener how large and heavy the dog is, but the second part of the experiment showed the scientist something very strange.
For the second experiment each dog was given a large meaty bone in an open room and the recordings of the 3 different growls were played through a hidden speaker. They 3 types of growls were the ones that showed the strange event. The play growl was significantly different when looking/ analyzing the growls recordings and showed no reaction when the dogs were chewing the bone. But the stranger and guarding growls looked identical, yet the dogs reacted completely different. As the scientist played the stranger approaching growl the dogs showed no notice of the noise other than an ear perk, but what they fully showed aggressive reactions towards was the dog guarding bone growl.
Since the two recordings of the stranger growl and bone growl were identical, scientist have theories that dogs can sense the inner emotional state of other dogs, and that aggressive "get away from my bone" emotional state comes out.
-Peter A. Lucas
wow, i have heard my dog growl while guarding a bone and i definitely did not want to bother her. I never thought that dogs would react differently to a growl that sounded the same though. if they can detect emotion in a simple tone of a growl do you think they could understand us better if we were more specific with our tones towards them?
ReplyDeletePosted by Amber Kapchinske
Considering how my dog reacts towards other dogs and with the information of this article I feel confident saying that dogs were bred to sense more emotion, to be more compatible with humans being 'mans best friend'.
ReplyDelete-Peter Lucas
It would make sense for dogs to pick up the emotions from other dogs even though the growls ("strangers" vs. "my bone") are exactly the same. This ability to pick up emotions is probably what allowed the domestic dog to be "man's best friend." Even though we are completely different species, dogs are able to determine the way we feel. This ability to detect emotion may have been especially advantageous to dogs, because then they can properly react to the way people feel (or at least figure out, as they can tell when people are happy when they do something good and such).
ReplyDeleteThis also suggests dogs are another of the few animals that have emotions that we can detect. Does detecting the emotion of other animals possible for the dogs? Perhaps dogs really are the connection people need to remind themselves that we are not outside of nature…
Posted by Leona Chan
Its interesting how much better a dog's hearing is than ours to detect such minor differences. I wonder what evolutionary mechanism is in place to give these dogs such great hearing.
ReplyDeleteAs a dog owner and lover I have always thought that dogs could sense things humans often cannot. It is so interesting that dogs were able to distinguish the identical stranger and aggressive growls, especially from a playback experiment. I would expect a difference in reaction in an actual stranger vs aggressive situation, but as a playback that is incredible.
ReplyDeletePosted by: Sara Weaver
That's really interesting to think of dog growls as encoding information about emotional state. You say that the stranger approaching growl and the defending the bone growl seemed identical, but if they cause different reactions in the dogs, they must be some difference present, even if it is imperceivable to humans. Did the authors of this article suggest what the difference might be? Did they perform an acoustic analysis?
ReplyDelete-Jane de Verges
As I said in the actual synopsis of the article that they did intact analyze and perform acoustic analysis; that's why the scientist running the experiment were startled and confused when the two identical growls of the stranger and bone brought about drastically different reactions from the dogs. That's how they got the idea that it could be emotion based, and since dogs were bred for human compionship, and to be sensitive to our own emotions, that its a gift that all dogs obtain due to evolution and breeding. I'm still very interested and have been looking into these trials even more with previous test on dog communication.
ReplyDelete*and that picture is my dog Stryder, just sayin lol*
-Peter Lucas
Just a little edit error: You said god at one point in your blog instead of dog
ReplyDeleteSecondly, I love that picture of your dog. He looks like my golden, although it made me miss him terribly.
Thirdly, this article confirms many suspicions I had about dog behavior. Dogs do seem to react to tone. I know the happier I sound when trying to get my dog to do something, the more likely he will listen to me. I am implying that this article is about dogs reacting to each others' tones but I think dogs react to humans' tones as well. Dogs are highly emotional creatures; some exhibit anxiety tendencies while others can become depressed. This article piqued my interest, thank you for sharing :)
- Vuzmal Sharma