The Mendicant Bug

Being in close proximity to two dogs for many hours per day over the past two years, I have come to recognize different barks that my dogs make as meaning different things.

Willow, my Australian Shepherd, has a bark that is very strained, urgent, fast, and loud that she uses to say she is in kill mode.  She uses this bark on things like cats and people or dogs that come onto our property at night.  She has another bark that says, “Pick up the damn ball I just dropped at your feet and play!”  This particular bark makes me want to smack her, but of course, I don’t.  Its insolence is simultaneously annoying and endearing.

My beagle Daedalus has a wider array of barks.  The best is the beagle howl.  This isn’t like a howling wolf, but more of a trumpeting ARRROOOOOOOOOOOOOO.  It is crazy loud and at first it was annoying, but now it just cracks me up.  He has a much more annoying bark he uses to say “Willow has a treat and I want it!”  This bark is loud, quick, and incessant.  He also uses this bark to alert us to the presence of animals.  When we visited my mother over Christmas, he would bark at her ferrets this way.  He wouldn’t attack them outright, since that isn’t really his nature, but he would get very close and bark and bark and bark and bark.  This is beagle breeding kicking in, since they are bred to track game and alert the hunters to its location.

So a new study reveals what most dog owners probably already took for granted.  There really is a dog language that other dogs understand and use to communicate with each other.  Using a neural network, Hungarian researchers were able to detect key features in barks that indicated the situation that caused them.  Accuracy of the software was different based on the situation.  But that the system was able to abstract similarities between the barks was pretty good evidence that there are common barking patterns for different activities.  My hope is that this research will encourage further studies that may be more accurate.  Perhaps being more accurate just isn’t possible, but that would also be interesting to know.

I see a valuable commercial interest here:  create a collar attachment that monitors the dog and whenever it barks, it speaks aloud — in English — the sentiment the dog is expressing.

WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!
“Aggression… Aggression… Aggression…”