"Yer killin' me...Bwaaaaaa!"
Posted on 12/04/2005 10:53:40 AM PST by wjersey
Researchers at the Spokane County Regional Animal Protection Service in Washington state say sometimes a bark is just a bark — but a long, loud panting sound has real meaning.
They say the long, loud pant is the sound of a dog laughing, and it has a direct impact on the behavior of other dogs.
"What we found is that it had a calming or soothing effect on the dogs," said Patricia Simonet, an animal behaviorist in Spokane who has studied everything from hamster culture to elephant self-recognition. "Now, we actually really weren't expecting that."
Nancy Hill, director of Spokane County Animal Protection, admits she was skeptical at first that this noise would affect the other dogs.
"I thought: Laughing dogs?" Hill said. "A sound that we're gonna isolate and play in the shelter? I was a real skeptic … until we played the recording here at the shelter."
When they played the sound of a dog panting over the loudspeaker, the gaggle of dogs at the shelter kept right on barking. But when they played the dog version of laughing, all 15 barking dogs went quiet within about a minute.
"It was a night-and-day difference," Hill said. "It was absolutely phenomenal."
Officials say it works every time, and researchers across the country are taking note.
"The laughing sound that they make is something that was not even considered a vocalization until this study was done," Simonet said.
Those who study dog behavior have varying opinions about exactly what Patricia Simonet's "dog laughing" sound really is. What they do agree on, however, is that to other dogs, it is at least a sound worth keeping quiet to listen to.
So my wife's laughing at me.
Uh oh...How comfortable is your couch???
I just read this article to my dog and------she laughed!
Who knew!
Could we try playing this sound in congress (the opposite of PROGRESS) to shut them up?
This dog-exhalation study reopens many questions about whether animals laugh, comments Brian Knutson of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. He has recorded chirps that laboratory rats give as they wrestle with each other. Rats also chirp before receiving morphine or having sex. He interprets the sound as indicating "the rat expects something rewarding." ... He says he's unsure about how to compare the chirp of a romping rat to the guffaw of a person. "I think we've done a decent job of figuring out what it means in the rat," he says. "Now the onus is on the human researchers."Another analyst of rat chirps, Jaak Panksepp of Bowling Green (Ohio) University, has recorded the animals' ultrasonic squeaks while he tickled them. "Of course, you have to know the rat," he cautions.
Yet another student of play, Marc Bekoff of the University of Colorado in Boulder, says he thinks he knows the panting sound Simonet describes. "When I get down on all fours and go up to dogs and go 'hhuhahhuhahhuh,' they get very solicitous," he says.
Now what am I doing when I do this?
If you lick a dogs mouth just after it ate, it will throw up.
This is a reaction of when dogs were wild, and they had to bring food back to the den. They would gorge themselves, and when returning, the puppys would lick the face, and the pack would feed the puppys.
They're probably just humoring the poor lunatic . . .
BAH! GMTA
ping
I'm not sure what noise they are describing either...
~shrugs~
It's when the dog pants and vocalizes simultaneously. The vocalization is higher-pitched than a bark, less harsh and much softer than a bark and the dog actually draws the corners of the mouth back, almost like a smile.
So it is kind of a whine with a smile on their face. I have heard that but would never call it panting. Begging for snacks but it becomes a bark when the snacks don't materialize.
I've actually never seen this behavior in domestic dogs, altho I know one breeder who said her female did this. I kind of think it's either a behavior we have bred out of them (for the most part) or it's not necessesary these days.
susie
I am not sure of the sound they mean, but I have panted at my dogs during play, and I have to say, they seem to react to it. I always thought they just were thinking was silly.
susie
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