His bark is worse than his bite !

Joe | blog | January 10, 2011

In a recent study in Budapest, Hungary, It was established that Dogs can tell the size of another dog by just hearing it’s growl…Specifics in the article hereunder. Having been the owner of Standard Smooth Dachshunds for over 9 years, people often ask me what they are like to own as dogs. I always advise that I can’t understand why they are not more popular, they are small, require very little grooming, will take as much exercise as you can give them, and are generally a healthy breed as long as you keep them at the right weight, and don’t let them run up and down stairs etc. After this I also add that they make great house protectors, as for their size they have a very deep bark. They do of course have a deep chest where this bark resounds from, and this was put to good use when carrying out the task they were bred for, when going to ground after prey and holding it at bay by using this bark and other methods until the hunter could dig down to this location. If my dogs are out in the walled garden and somebody approached the gate, and heard the bark they would I’m sure think it was a Rottweiler…According to this study, if another dog came to the same gate they would know instantly what size comrade was on the other side….Just another case of dogs being smarter then their owners !

“Several studies suggest that dogs, as well as primates, utilize a mental representation of the signaler after hearing its vocalization and can match this representation with other features provided by the visual modality. Recently it was found that a dogs’ growl is context specific and contains information about the caller’s body size. Whether dogs can use the encoded information is as yet unclear. In this experiment, we tested whether dogs can assess the size of another dog if they hear an agonistic growl paired with simultaneous video projection of two dog pictures. One of them matched the size of the growling dog, while the other one was either 30% larger or smaller. In control groups, noise, cat pictures or projections of geometric shapes (triangles) were used. The results showed that dogs look sooner and longer at the dog picture matching the size of the caller. No such preference was found with any of the control stimuli, suggesting that dogs have a mental representation of the caller when hearing its vocalization”