Barking Dogs Explained

Barking -- With Reason. Animal welfare researchers have uncovered why
city-living domestic dogs may be prone to nuisance barking. iStockPhoto

From Discovery:

Animal welfare researchers have uncovered why city-living domestic dogs may be prone to nuisance barking.

In this month's issue of Australian Veterinary Journal, a team from the University of Queensland's Center for Animal Welfare and Ethics report a case-control survey of 150 dog owners including 72 dogs whose owners had sought treatment for nuisance barking.

Barking can be classified as being a nuisance when it causes distress or interruption to the life of the dogs' owners or neighbors.

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The Secrets Inside Your Dog's Mind

From Time Magazine:

Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, holds out a dog biscuit.

"Henry!" he says. Henry is a big black schnauzer-poodle mix--a schnoodle, in the words of his owner, Tracy Kivell, another Duke anthropologist. Kivell holds on to Henry's collar so that he can only gaze at the biscuit.

"You got it?" Hare asks Henry. Hare then steps back until he's standing between a pair of inverted plastic cups on the floor. He quickly puts the hand holding the biscuit under one cup, then the other, and holds up both empty hands. Hare could run a very profitable shell game. No one in the room--neither dog nor human--can tell which cup hides the biscuit.

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Wolves Beat Dogs on Logic Test

Wolves and dogs diverged from a common ancestor at least 15,000 years ago.
Credit: stock.xpert

From Live Science:

Wolves do better on some tests of logic than dogs, a new study found, revealing differences between the animals that scientists suspect result from dogs' domestication.

In experiments, dogs followed human cues to perform certain tasks despite evidence they could see suggesting a different strategy would be smarter, while wolves made the more logical choice based on their observations.

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Dogs Descended From Wolf Pack On Yangtze River

From The Telegraph:

Today's dogs are all descended from a pack of wolves tamed 16,000 years ago on the shores of the Yangtze river, according to new research.

It was previously known that the birthplace of the dog was eastern Asia but historians were not able to be more precise than that.

However, now researchers have made a number of new discoveries about the history of man's best friend - including that the dog appeared about 16,000 years ago south of the Yangtze river in China.

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Why Obama's Dog Has Curly Hair

Portugese water dog. (Credit: iStockphoto/Lee Feldstein)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2009) — University of Utah researchers used data from Portuguese water dogs – the breed of President Barack Obama's dog Bo – to help find a gene that gives some dogs curly hair and others long, wavy hair.

It was part of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study – published online Thursday, Aug. 27 by the journal Science – showing that variations in only three genes account for the seven major types of coat seen in purebred dogs. The findings also point the way toward understanding complex human diseases caused by multiple genes.

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The Origin Of Dogs

From Scientific American:

Fido's cousins may be Eurasian wolves, but new findings complicate the details of domestication.

From precious pomeranians to mangy mutts, all domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) seem to be descended from the Eurasian gray wolf (Canis lupis). But what we still don't know is exactly when and where our best friends transformed from predators into partners. And such knowledge might help solve the long-disputed question of exactly why dogs were the first animal to be domesticated.

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Domestic Dog Origins Challenged

Domestic dog origins challenged

From BBC News:

The suggestion that the domestic dog originated in East Asia has been challenged.

The huge genetic diversity of dogs found in East Asia had led many scientists to conclude that domestication began there.

But new research published in the journal PNAS shows the DNA of dogs in African villages is just as varied.

An international group of researchers analysed blood samples from dogs in Egypt, Uganda and Namibia.

Today's dogs are descended from Eurasian grey wolves, domesticated between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago.

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Not Only Dogs, But Deer, Monkeys And Birds Bark To Deal With Conflict

Photo: Why do dogs bark so much? A recent paper by UMass Amherst evolutionary biologist Kathryn Lord and colleagues suggests that it has more to do with their evolutionary history as scavengers in dumps than their desire to communicate with humans. (Credit: Raymond Coppinger)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 15, 2009) — Biologically speaking, many animals besides dogs bark, according to Kathryn Lord at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but the evolutionary biologist also says domestic dogs vocalize in this way much more than birds, deer, monkeys and other wild animals that use barks. The reason is related to dogs’ 10,000-year history of hanging around human food refuse dumps, she suggests.

In her recent paper in a special issue of the journal, Behavioural Processes, Lord and co-authors from nearby Hampshire College also provide the scientific literature with its first consistent, functional and acoustically precise definition of this common animal sound.

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Dogs Are Smarter Than Cats, Research Shows

From The Telegraph:

The thought processes of 15 cats were tested by attaching food to the end of lengths of string and observing whether they could figure out that pulling the line brought the treats closer.

The cats had no problem with tackling single pieces of string. However, when faced with two options, experts discovered that unlike their canine counterparts, cats were unable to consistently pick a baited string over a dummy.

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What Really Prompts The Dog's 'Guilty Look'

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 14, 2009) — What dog owner has not come home to a broken vase or other valuable items and a guilty-looking dog slouching around the house? By ingeniously setting up conditions where the owner was misinformed as to whether their dog had really committed an offense, Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor from Barnard College in New York, uncovered the origins of the “guilty look” in dogs in the recently published “Canine Behaviour and Cognition” Special Issue of Elsevier’s Behavioural Processes.

Horowitz was able to show that the human tendency to attribute a “guilty look” to a dog was not due to whether the dog was indeed guilty. Instead, people see ‘guilt’ in a dog’s body language when they believe the dog has done something it shouldn’t have – even if the dog is in fact completely innocent of any offense.

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Fact or Fiction: Dogs Can Talk

From Scientific American:

Are human speech-like vocalizations made by some mammals equivalent to conversation--or just a rough estimation of it?

Maya, a noisy, seven-year-old pooch, looks straight at me. And with just a little prompting from her owner says, "I love you." Actually, she says "Ahh rooo uuu!"

Maya is working hard to produce what sounds like real speech. "She makes these sounds that really, really sound like words to everyone who hears her, but I think you have to believe," says her owner, Judy Brookes.

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My Comment: I do not know if dogs can talk, but I do know that I can always talk to my dog.

Cocker Spaniel World's Meanest Dog

The reason for any individual dog's aggression may be a combination of genetics and poor training, the scientists say (Source: iStockphoto)

From ABC News Australia:

A floppy-eared, innocent-looking breed may be one of the world's most aggressive dogs, according to a new study.

The Spanish study found that English cocker spaniels tend to be more hostile than other breeds.

The discovery adds to the mounting evidence that aggressiveness is an inherited characteristic, suggesting that genes and breeding practices can both help determine how a dog will behave.

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Dogs Catch Human Yawns

This Hungarian Vizsla is either really sleepy or just spied its owner yawning. Credit: Dreamstime.com.

From Live Science:

Spying someone yawning often makes us yawn. Now, a new study shows your canine buddy can catch yawns from you, too.

The results suggest domestic dogs have the capacity for a fundamental form of empathy, the researchers say.

The phenomenon, called contagious yawning, has been found only in humans and other primates such as chimpanzees and is thought to relate to our ability to empathize with others. Past studies, however, involved yawning within one species at a time, so for instance chimps that triggered other chimps to yawn and humans prompting yawns in other humans.

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