http://www.sciencenews.org/20010728/fob9.asp

Don't look now, but is that dog laughing?

Susan Milius

Amid all the panting, a dog at play makes a distinctive, breathy exhalation
that can trigger playfulness in other dogs, says a Nevada researcher. Yes,
it might be the dog version of a laugh.

"To an untrained human ear, it sounds much like a pant, 'hhuh, hhuh,'" says
Patricia Simonet of Sierra Nevada College in Lake Tahoe. However, this
exhalation bursts into a broader range of frequencies than does regular dog
panting, Simonet discovered when she and her students analyzed recordings.

They observed the bursts during play but not in aggressive clashes, Simonet
reported in Corvallis, Ore., last week at a meeting of the Animal Behavior
Society.

Gordon Burghardt of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, who theorizes
about the evolution of play, says Simonet's presentation caught his
interest. Her dog-laughing proposal needs more testing, he cautions. But he
notes that other scientists have proposed that nonhuman primates and even
rodents laugh.

Simonet's team investigated the question by standing in parks with a
parabolic microphone that enables them to record dog hubbub from a
distance. "People kept coming up to talk to us, so we finally had to wear
signs explaining that we were trying to record," she says.

Simonet differentiates a broader-frequency exhalation from pants by calling
it a laugh. With recordings of such laughs and growls, the researchers
tested 15 mostly young dogs in an observation room. When the researchers
broadcast the laugh, a puppy often picked up a toy or trotted toward a
presumed playmate, if a person or another dog was in the room. Simonet's
own best attempt at the laugh likewise prompted dogs to look for a romp.
Broadcasting growls elicited no such effects.

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."

Such phenomena help neuroscientists trace the brain's reward circuitry,
Knutson explains. 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. He says he is
open to the possibility that the rat chirps amount to laughter in the
animal world. Also, he suggests that Simonet's team could search for animal
laughter by recording the sound dogs make when they are tickled.

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. "Whether it turns out to be like a laugh or not
doesn't matter in the end, because what's important are all the questions
it opens up about how communications work."
 
 

References:

Simonet, O., M. Murphy, and A. Lance. 2001. Laughing dog: Vocalizations of
domestic dogs during play encounters. Animal Behavior Society conference.
July 14-18. Corvallis, Oregon.

Further Readings:

2000. The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of Animal Emotions.
Bekoff, M., ed. Random House/Discovery Books.

Provine, R.R. 2000. Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. Viking: New York.

Sources:

Marc Bekoff Environmental Biology Section University of Colorado, Boulder
Boulder, CO 80309

Gordon M. Burghardt Department of Psychology University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-0900

Brian Knutson Building 10, Room 6S240 Mail Stop 1610 Bethesda, MD 20892

Jaak Panksepp Department of Psychology Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, OH 43403

Patricia Simonet Science Department Sierra Nevada College 999 Tahoe
Boulevard Incline Village, NV 89451

From Science News, Vol. 160, No. 4, July 28, 2001, p. 55.
 

Copyright Ĺ 2001 Science Service. All rights reserved.