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If you live with a hound, you are familiar with the howl. From a staccato baying to a mournful wail, howling in dogs seems to be a behavior left over from their ancestors, living in social packs. Wolves howl when separated from the group, and also when setting out with the group for a hunt or in reunion afterward. A howl when alone is a communication seeking company; howling together may be simply a rallying cry or celebration of the group. It has a contagious component, leading others in the vicinity to pick it up in an impromptu fugue. We do not know what they are saying, to each other or to the moon.

The most social of human sounds is the cackling laugh rumbling across the room. Do dogs laugh? Well, only when something is terrific fun. Yes, dogs have what has been called a laugh. It is not identical to human laughter, the spontaneous sounds spit out in response to something funny, surprising, or even frightening. Nor is it as variable as the cackles, giggles, and twitters that we produce. The dog laugh is a breathy exhalation that sounds like an excited burst of panting. We could call it social panting: it is a pant only heard when dogs are playing or trying to get someone to play with them. Dogs don't seem to laugh to themselves, off sitting in the corner of the room, recollecting how that tawny dog in the park outsmarted her human this morning. Instead, dogs laugh when interacting socially. If you have played with your dog, you have probably heard it. In fact, doing your own social panting toward a dog is one of the most effective ways to elicit play.

Just as our laughs are often inadvertent, reflexive responses, so may dog laughs be: simply the kind of panting that results when you're throwing your body around in play. Though it might not be under the control of the dog, social panting does seem to be a sign of enjoyment. And it may induce enjoyment—or at least alleviate stress—in others: playing a recording of the sounds of dog laughter at animal shelters has been found to reduce barking, pacing, and other signs of stress in the dogs housed there. Whether mirth feels like what it does in humans is yet to be studied.

WOOF

I can remember the first time a bark came out of Pump, when she was maybe three years old. She'd been so quiet until then, and then one day, after spending time with her barky German shepherd friend, a bark popped out of her. It was bark like more than a bark, as though a sound that stood for a bark but wasn't itself the real thing: a well-articulated rurph! accompanied by a little leap off her front legs and a madly wagging tail. She refined this splendid display somewhat through the years, but it always felt like a new dog thing she was trying on.

It is regrettable that barks tend to be such loud affairs. The bark is shouted. While a calm conversation between the two strollers in the park might register about 60 decibels, dog barks begin at 70 decibels and a stream of barks may be punctuated with spikes to 130 decibels. Increases in decibels, the unit of measurement of the loudness of sounds, are exponential: an increase of 10 decibels describes a hundredfold rise in the experience of the strength of a sound. One hundred and thirty decibels is up there with thunderclaps and plane takeoffs. The bark is momentary, but it is a moment of displeasure for our ears. The reason this is regrettable is that there is, most dog researchers agree, much information in those barks. Given the relative scarcity of barking in wolves, some theorize that dogs have developed a more elaborate barking language precisely in order to communicate with humans. If we consider barks as all cut from the same cloth, though, they are likelier to annoy than to communicate.

Researchers might not call barks "annoying," but they call them "chaotic" and "noisy." "Chaotic" is a good description for the variability in the kinds of sounds within each bark; "noisy" means not just disagreeably loud but also having fluctuations in its structure. Barks are loud, and different