Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [37]
There is a certain poignancy in describing animals as our "dumb friends"; in noting the "blank bewilderment" of a dog; in nodding at their "uncommunicating muteness." These are familiar ways of talking about dogs, who never respond in kind as we speak to them. No small amount of dogs' winsomeness is the empathy that we can attribute to them as they silently contemplate us. Still, these characterizations, while evocative, seem to me to be outright flawed in two ways. First, it is not the animals who desire to speak and cannot, I suspect; it is that we desire them to talk and cannot effect it. Second, most animals, and dogs in particular, are neither blank of expression nor in fact mute. Dogs, like wolves, communicate with their eyes, ears, tail, and very posture. Far from pleasantly silent, they squeal, growl, grunt, yelp, moan, whine, whimper, bark, yawn, and howl. And that's just in the first few weeks.
Dogs talk. They communicate; they declare; they express themselves. This comes as no surprise; what is surprising is how often they are communicating, and in how many ways. They talk to each other, they talk to you, and they talk to noises on the other side of closed doors or hidden in high grasses. This gregariousness is familiar to us: having a large roster of communications is consistent with being social, as humans are. Those canids such as foxes, who do not live in a social group, appear to have a much more limited range of things to say. Even the kinds of sounds foxes make are indicative of their more solitary nature: they make sounds that travel well over long distances. Dogs' staunch unmuteness is expressed through making sounds bellowed and whispered. Vocalizations, scent, stance, and facial expression each function to communicate to other dogs and, if we know how to listen, to us.
OUT LOUD
Two human beings stroll through a park chatting. They move with ease from commenting on the warmth of the air, to the nature of humans in positions of power, to expressions of mutual adoration, to reflections on past expressions of mutual adoration, to admonishment to observe the tree straight ahead. They do this primarily by making small, strange contortions of the shape of the cavities of their mouths, the placement of their tongues, by pushing air through the vocal tract and squeezing or widening their lips. Theirs is not the only communication going on. Over the course of a walk, the dogs by their sides may scold one another, confirm friendships, court each other, declare dominance, rebuff advances, claim ownership of a stick, or assert allegiance to their person. Dogs, like so many non-human animals, have evolved innumerable, non-language-driven methods to communicate with one another. Human facility at communication is unquestionable. We converse with an elaborate, symbol-driven language, quite unlike anything seen in other animals. But we sometimes forget that even non-language-using creatures might be talking up a storm.
What animals have are whole systems of behavior that get information from a sender (speaker) to a recipient (listener). That is all that is needed to call something a communication. It needn't be important, relevant, or even interesting information, but between animals it often is. Communication is only sometimes within our range of hearing, or even vocal: it is often made through body language—using limbs, head, eyes, tails, or the entire body—or even through such surprising forms as changing color, urinating and defecating, or making oneself larger or smaller.
We can spot a communication by noticing if, after one animal makes a noise or does an action, another responds to it by changing its behavior. Information has been imparted. What we'll miss, since we don't know the language of, say, spiders or sloths (though there are currently researchers trying to learn these communication systems), is those utterances that fall on deaf ears. Still, animals are constant gabbers. The