The Vegas Voice 3-21

Superior Species
By: Judy Polumbaum / Our View
Some months into the pandemic, I read about
an ongoing study into dog vocalization.
What sets off a dog?
The researchers were inviting dog owners
to volunteer their pets as subjects and, if
selected, to send in videos of their dogs
responding to prompts in the environment.
I was thrilled at the prospect that my two
little rescues might contribute to this project.
They are smallish tri-colored females –
littermates, we assume, since they came
together from a shelter in Chicago, although
the details of their origins are lost to history.
I’ve long been a Beagle person, which requires judicious calculations
about indoors versus outdoors, and sometimes negotiations with
neighbors since Beagles can be noisy.
Encounters with other dogs, or with people, or the glimpse of a rabbit
or lizard, or merely a rustle in the bushes, are likely to elicit annoying
barking. Other signals – sirens in the distance, or who knows what
vibrations inaudible to humans – can trigger truly fantastic crooning.
And our girls seldom croon exactly in synch; they have a kind of calland-response
thing going.
To my disappointment, the vocalization study turned out to be
oversubscribed, and our offer to participate was declined. So we are left
as before, to our own interpretations of canine communications.
Thus, the bark in response to a delivery at the door is an alert. The
bark toward another dog is exhortation.
The bark hailing people extends friendship. The special exuberance
for small children conveys shared stature and kindred feeling.
And those marvelous duets? Our dogs are
training for the opera, of course.
We tend to anthropomorphize everything
as we suss out these messages in human
terms. We sometimes forget that dogs are
another species – certainly far more gifted
than humans in certain sensory abilities,
and perhaps superior in their ability to
beguile us into emotional, logistical and
financial enslavement, but also different from us.
Legions of studies show that pets are good for our mental and physical
health. Less commented upon is their importance in existential terms.
Our beloved animals remind us that this planet we think we have
conquered belongs to a myriad of other life forms. We will never crack
all their codes.
Judy is a professor emerita of journalism and a transplant to
Las Vegas from New England via China, the West Coast and the
Midwest.
26
March 2021