Human-dog communication still has a way to go

Knowing what someone is saying or, more importantly, what they mean, goes to the heart of getting along — a gap that sometimes is bridged between species that share environments.

Animals often learn to recognize the alarm calls of cohabitants. When squirrel chatter turns to screeching, for example, birds move higher in the trees and ground animals scramble for cover, and critters of all sizes get the message when a predator snarls over a fresh kill.

Likewise, animals learn about human ways to clue them into what’s next — all part of getting along and maximizing survival and success.

Integrated into the human world for thousands of years and having perhaps one of the longest and most elaborate histories of interaction, dogs are the natural go-to when it comes to learning how communication works between species.

As a result, countless studies have sought to document and understand the extent to which dogs understand humans, their spoken language, tones of voice, body language, facial expressions and all things communication.

How well humans understand dogs however, has received quite a bit less attention — after all, the general expectation is that dogs should adapt to our world.

Nonetheless, dogs do communicate all the time, and the degree to which humans are able to interpret that is an important component to the overall picture.

While aspects of dog communication have been altered by proximity to humans — for instance facial expressions are found to mimic those of humans, as do many of their vocalizations — the growl, according to a group of Hungarian scientists, remains largely unchanged by human influence.

To see how well humans can interpret the emotional context of dog growls, the researchers used recordings of three types — playful, food defense and threatening growling.

Forty adult participants were asked to rate the emotional meaning of the growls based on: aggression, fear, despair, happiness and playfulness, then place the growls in context of play, food guarding and threatening.

Overall, 63 percent of growls were correctly identified, however researchers found people had difficulty identifying negative growls, according to a May report published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

While participants recognized playful growling at a rate of 81 percent, they only correctly interpreted food guarding 60 percent and threatening growls 50 percent of the time, often confusing the two.

Interestingly, researchers noted that even when misidentified, participants rated the growls of a dog guarding its food as more aggressive than a dog growling at a threatening stranger.

Of participants, women and dog owners were best at decoding dog growls.

Attributing women’s accuracy to intrinsically higher emotional sensitivity, researchers concluded the greatest insight uncovered was tied to dog owners’ ability to interpret and distinguish between growls, an indication greater understanding comes from experience.

After eons as companions, the human-dog combo is an exceptional example of inter-species communication and collaboration that continues to amaze and fuel scientific intrigue; however there’s clearly some ways to go, and, some learning to be done, if it’s ever to be a two-way street.

Sharna Johnson is always searching for ponies. You can reach her at:

[email protected]