Tucson Animal Tails: Dog barks pointless, new theory indicates

The Kansas City Star, February 18, 1993

Boston—If you think you know why dogs bark, you’re far ahead of scientists.

Domestic dogs have been around since the caveman, but only recently have researches come up with a theory to explain the noise.

Oh, come on, you’re thinking. What’s so hard? Dogs bark for the same reason people talk: because they want to communicate something, right? Fifi barks when she wants food. King ruffs it up when he wants to play. Spot yaps at the mailman.

Well, that’s only part of the story, said two researchers who spoke Monday in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“The question of why dogs bark is a wonderful question because it’s such a mystery,” said Raymond Coppinger of Hampshire College in South Amherst, Mass.

Coppinger and his colleague, Mark Feinstein, say barking actually may have no primary function at all, not one.

Instead, it may be just an artifact of prehistoric domestication, a result of Darwinian evolution that created a tame, but yapping, juvenile dog.

That means when nature’s forces built the domestic dog, barking just happened to get left in the genetic mix.

“It is repetitious, meaningless and functionless,” Feinstein said.

That notion may be hard to believe for any dog owner whose pet has chased off a burglar, saved a child from a burning building or just woofed in happy greeting.

But Coppinger and Feinstein said six years of research convinced them that barking is merely a byproduct.

Before they could answer why dogs barked, they looked at what might motivate dogs to bark. The answer was nothing and everything.

“They bark at everything and nothing, any time of the night or day,” Coppinger said.

They watched dogs bark at the wind and at leaves, at the ground and the night sky, at people coming and people going, at people they knew and people they didn’t.

Sometimes a dog will bark so hard and long it will inflame its vocal cords until it no longer can make a sound. Still, it will try to bark.

“We observed a livestock-guarding dog on a cold winter night, no predators around, just out there,” Feinstein said. “Nothing around. The dog barked for seven hours straight.”

Dogs sometimes bark at each other, or join a chorus of barking, but the researchers said these dogs often are not directing their barks at each other. They are just barking randomly with no apparent point.

“Barking does not look like a very efficient communications system,” Feinstein said. “Barking often goes out without any response.”

They also compared domestic dogs with coyotes and wolves, the dog’s closest cousins that might offer hints to its prehistoric behavior.

Again, they found differences: “Wild animals in general are very quiet,” Feinstein said.

In wolves, barking accounts for about 2.5 percent of their vocalizations; in dogs, it makes up about 95 percent.

Then they looked at environment. When domestic dogs are released in the wild, they bark, but how about wolves and coyotes? Would they bark if kept in a domesticated setting?

The finding, said Feinstein: “Dogs bark. Coyotes don’t.”

“When you put coyotes in a kennel when dogs are barking incessantly, they just sit there not interested,” he said.

Finally they noticed something in wolves that formed the basis of their theory.

“While adult wolves don’t bark, young wolves do,” Feinstein said. “They bark in their dens. They begin to bark at about the same point dog pups do.”

At six to seven weeks after birth, however, when dog pups still are barking continuously, wolf pups stop.

Dog pups will continue barking even after the noise fails to elicit any kind of nurturing response from their mothers.

But for dog lovers who insist that dogs communicate, take heart. Feinstein and Coppinger don’t completely disagree.

Just because barking is a genetic holdover with no primary function, “we don’t mean it is completely meaningless,” Feinstein said.