This paper will look at one of the communication systems of dogs – sound. It will look at how dogs communicate in the wild, and how they communicate with man in captivity. It will deal with spoken language as a means of communication animal-to-animal and animal-to-man.
In human language, the actual sounds that make up the words we hear have no intrinsic relation to the meaning of the words themselves. However, in animal vocalizations, this is not so. It is almost a universal law of animal communication that low sounds (growls) indicate aggression and high sounds (whines) indicate fear or appeasement (Budiansky, 1995). Big things generally make low sounds and small things make high sounds. Whines and growls therefore take advantage of both the laws of acoustics and eons of evolved experience: it pays to recognize…