Whether you have a dog or not, you’ve probably seen one somewhere barking and you wonder what the heck it is doing. I certainly have.
Do dogs bark to say “hello?” Are they territorial and telling the hound next door, “This is my place. Stay off my turf.” Or, when they unleash a staccato of yaps, is it just that they want to share neighborhood information, “Hey, Waldo, there’s a skunk living in the ditch in front of the house on the corner. Check it out. Maybe you’ll get sprayed like I did. Smells great.”
We don’t know. It’s all assumptions on our part. Dogs have their own language.
Dogs operate in ways we can’t understand. Their senses (sight, smell and hearing) are supposed to be heightened compared to humans. That’s accurate based on the reactions our two dogs – Pepper and Thor – display when the slightest noise is out of the ordinary.
We see this in our house, when for absolutely no reason at all (to us deaf humans), both of them jump from the couch and blast their way to the doggie door, on a mission to communicate with their fellow mammal. Within seconds, sure enough, a dog will emerge around the curve on our street, and the barking contest begins.
“This is my place. Stay off the turf,” ours howl.
“So what. You’re behind the fence and can’t do anything about it,” the dog on the street responds. He then lifts his leg and hoses down our mailbox or drops a couple of loafs on our grass.
That’s probably a pretty accurate conversation from the human perspective. What amazes me most in those situations though is, “How the heck did our dogs know the other one was coming up the street?” Ours were sleeping or lounging about, so they didn’t see anything out the window. I can’t imagine they smelled the newcomer since ours where indoors.
That leaves the third option, which is that somehow they heard the other mongrel. Can they hear a pin drop a block away? Sometimes I wonder.
When we drive our cars up the driveway, the dogs are often there to greet us. It may be that they only happened to be there by coincidence. But, if I am home alone, and my wife’s car comes up the street, the dogs have already heard her vehicle and are sprinting outside to greet her. “How the heck far away can they hear a car?”
I’m not sure of that answer, either. So, I decided to test Pepper and Thor’s hearing recently.
The TV was on. The microwave was humming and I was putting some shredded cheese on a plate. “Hmmmm, I wonder if the dogs can hear one sliver of shredded cheese drop into their food dish?” Surely not, the human thinks.
I sneak over to their metal food bowls on the floor. Thor is upstairs, Pepper lying down facing away from me. I drop one tiny and thin shredded piece of cheese into the dish. It lands, muffled by the background noise. But it must have “dinged” somehow on the metal, because Pepper IMMEDIATELY rousts herself, and comes over to inhale the human food. Snarf, snarf. Unbelievable.
My wife is sitting in the room, and I explain my dog hearing experiment to her. She shakes her head. She knows all about animals, so she probably isn’t surprised.
But I am astounded. Think if we could harness dog hearing for national security. They could eavesdrop on North Korea or the Russians from a neighboring continent. The implications for intelligence gathering are titanic.
And if we could figure out what the barking means, we might get somewhere.
Do dogs bark to say “hello?” Are they territorial and telling the hound next door, “This is my place. Stay off my turf.” Or, when they unleash a staccato of yaps, is it just that they want to share neighborhood information, “Hey, Waldo, there’s a skunk living in the ditch in front of the house on the corner. Check it out. Maybe you’ll get sprayed like I did. Smells great.”
We don’t know. It’s all assumptions on our part. Dogs have their own language.
Dogs operate in ways we can’t understand. Their senses (sight, smell and hearing) are supposed to be heightened compared to humans. That’s accurate based on the reactions our two dogs – Pepper and Thor – display when the slightest noise is out of the ordinary.
We see this in our house, when for absolutely no reason at all (to us deaf humans), both of them jump from the couch and blast their way to the doggie door, on a mission to communicate with their fellow mammal. Within seconds, sure enough, a dog will emerge around the curve on our street, and the barking contest begins.
“This is my place. Stay off the turf,” ours howl.
“So what. You’re behind the fence and can’t do anything about it,” the dog on the street responds. He then lifts his leg and hoses down our mailbox or drops a couple of loafs on our grass.
That’s probably a pretty accurate conversation from the human perspective. What amazes me most in those situations though is, “How the heck did our dogs know the other one was coming up the street?” Ours were sleeping or lounging about, so they didn’t see anything out the window. I can’t imagine they smelled the newcomer since ours where indoors.
That leaves the third option, which is that somehow they heard the other mongrel. Can they hear a pin drop a block away? Sometimes I wonder.
When we drive our cars up the driveway, the dogs are often there to greet us. It may be that they only happened to be there by coincidence. But, if I am home alone, and my wife’s car comes up the street, the dogs have already heard her vehicle and are sprinting outside to greet her. “How the heck far away can they hear a car?”
I’m not sure of that answer, either. So, I decided to test Pepper and Thor’s hearing recently.
The TV was on. The microwave was humming and I was putting some shredded cheese on a plate. “Hmmmm, I wonder if the dogs can hear one sliver of shredded cheese drop into their food dish?” Surely not, the human thinks.
I sneak over to their metal food bowls on the floor. Thor is upstairs, Pepper lying down facing away from me. I drop one tiny and thin shredded piece of cheese into the dish. It lands, muffled by the background noise. But it must have “dinged” somehow on the metal, because Pepper IMMEDIATELY rousts herself, and comes over to inhale the human food. Snarf, snarf. Unbelievable.
My wife is sitting in the room, and I explain my dog hearing experiment to her. She shakes her head. She knows all about animals, so she probably isn’t surprised.
But I am astounded. Think if we could harness dog hearing for national security. They could eavesdrop on North Korea or the Russians from a neighboring continent. The implications for intelligence gathering are titanic.
And if we could figure out what the barking means, we might get somewhere.