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By Root 766 0

but barks do not form the preponderance of most dogs' daily noisemaking, which includes high and low sounds, incidental sounds, even howls and chuckles. High-frequency sounds—cries, squeals, whines, whimpers, yelps, and screams—occur when the dog is in sudden pain or needs attention. These are some of the first sounds a puppy will make, which clues us in to their meaning: they tend to attract attention of the mother. A yelp might come out of a puppy who was just stepped on, or who has wandered off. Deaf and blind, it is easier for mom to find her pup than vice versa. Having been reunited, some continue to yelp, winding down off their crying jag, when carried by their mothers. Yelps are different than screams, which in wolves prompt the mother to groom the pup, providing the contact that is necessary for normal development. Cries and squeals may be ignored by the mother, and so a particular squeal may be a less specifically meaningful utterance and instead a general-purpose sound used simply to see how others respond.

Low moans or grunts are also very common in puppies, and seem not to be signs of pain but rather a kind of dog purr. There are snuffling moans and sighing moans—what some call "contentment grunts," and they all seem to mean about the same thing. Pups moan when they are in close contact with littermates, their mother, or a well-known human caretaker. The sound might be simply a result of heavy, slow breathing, which indicates it might not be intentionally produced: there is no evidence that dogs moan on purpose (neither is there evidence that they do not; neither has been proven). But whether they do or not, moans probably function to affirm the bond between family members, whether heard as a low vibration or felt through skin-to-skin contact.

The rumble of a growl and the steady ominous snarl, you won't need to be told, are aggressive sounds. Puppies do not tend to produce them, as puppies do not tend to initiate aggression. Part of what makes them aggressive is their low pitch: they are the kind of sounds that would come out of a large animal, rather than the high-pitched squeals of a small one. In an antagonistic (what in biology is called agonistic) encounter with another animal, a dog wants to appear to be the bigger, more powerful creature—so he makes a big-dog sound. By making higher-pitched sounds, an animal sounds, simply, smaller: a friendly or appeasing noise, by contrast. Though aggressive in intent, growls are still social sounds, not just utterances produced when a dog feels fear or anger: for the most part, dogs do not growl at inanimate objects,* or even at animate objects that aren't faced or directed toward them. They are also subtler than we think: distinct growls, from rumble to nearly roaring, are used in different contexts. The growl of tug-of-war may sound fearsome, but it is nothing like the possessive warning snarled over a treasured bone. Play these growls back over a speaker set up right in front of a desirable bone and dogs in the vicinity will avoid the bone—even with no dog in sight. But if the speaker growls only play or stranger growls, nearby dogs go ahead and grab the unguarded bone.

Incidental sounds of dogs are sometimes produced so reliably in certain contexts that they have become effectively communicative. The play slap, an audible landing on the two forefeet at once, is an inevitable part of play. It conveys sufficient exuberance that it can be used by itself to ask a dog to play with you. Some dogs chatter their teeth in anxious excitement, and the clicking of teeth serves as a warning that the dog is wary. An exaggerated shriek on being nosed or bitten roughly in play can even become a ritualized deception, a way to get out of a social interaction that is making the dog uncertain. The snuffling sound created when reaching the head vertically up and sniffing for food around a human mouth can become not just a search for food but also a request for food. Even the noisy breathing created by lying so close as to have the nose pressed against another body comes