How do dogs bark?
This is the question, Meagan, a fourth grade student asks bassethoundtown. I am stumped! I found the answer to why, but not how.

Anyone out there in cyber space want to help us? Thanks alot! Meagan, Cat, Chapas and Emma!
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From the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine Animal Health Newsletter

There may be as many theories as to why dogs bark as there are barking dogs. Perhaps the latest entry is that dogs bark because, in evolutionary terms, there are stuck at an adolescent stage of development. Therefore, like other adolescents with whom you might be acquainted, they are loud, obstreperous, repetitious and a general noisy nuisance.

There can be no doubt about the noise. The theory’s authors, biologist Raymond Coppinger and linguist Mark Feinstein, both of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA cite a report that clocked a Cocker Spaniel’s 907 barks in a ten-minute period. Shades of heavy metal! The reasons dogs bark are to sound an alarm, to warn intruders off a marked territory, to express anxiety, to greet owners, and so on. Dogs also bark more than their evolutionary ancestor, the wolf, which seldom barks after it is no longer a pup.

So what’s wrong with the dog as we know and hear it? In their report, which appeared in Smithsonian magazine, these researchers say that the dog as we hear it today is the result of an evolutionary process that has gone somewhat awry. In more scientific terms, the dog’s heterochronic evolutionary mechanism has been slowed down. A heterochronic mechanism can either speed up or slow down the rate at which an animal grows from newborn to adult. If slowed down, the animal will not attain its normal adult form, leaving it, as it were, a perpetual adolescent. That means it will lack some of the full physical and psychologic maturity of a normal adult. The result can be behavior that appears non-functional — like 907 barks in 10 minutes.

According to Coppinger and Feinstein, dogs are heterochronically slowed down and frozen in adolescent life, perpetually mixing bits and pieces of infantile behavior with more mature behavior. So, to paraphrase this report, dogs bark so much because that is what juvenile canids normally do. There you are — they won’t clean up their room and they won’t turn down the noise. And now they have evolutionary theory on their side!

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