Mary Allen
Put your head in the air and off you go! Dogs howl like the proverbial castle dogs. It used to be believed that the death of a loved one was imminent. Today there is trouble with the neighbors. Why do dogs howl anyway?
Who does not know this: An ambulance rushes past with a wailing siren, immediately a dog in the neighborhood starts howling loudly. He certainly doesn’t howl from the pain that such a sound causes him. Then he would hide. On the contrary: “By howling, dogs communicate where they are and how they feel, they are looking for contact or an end to their loneliness,” explains the St. Gallen animal psychologist and dog trainer Manuela Albrecht.
Some tones can be downright intoxicating for four-legged friends. Not all of us can hear, either, because dogs perceive sounds more than twice as high as we do. The four-legged friends can even hear sounds of up to 50,000 Hertz. “Dogs sometimes howl with the sound of sirens or musical instruments. There are even frequencies that can bring the genetic heritage to life. The dogs howl because it feels positive for them, »says Albrecht. This positive feeling likes to take on collective traits. “Everyone who howls along belongs to the group or to the pack.” This strengthens the cohesion and social structure of the group. Experts call it to contact howling.
Owners of several dogs are usually allowed to listen to a chorus of howls. Because barking and howling are contagious. “If one starts, everyone in the whole district or in the group will soon do it,” says the animal psychologist. This is often preceded by an alarm barking.
Stefan Kirchhoff is a former animal shelter manager and was deputy head of wolf researcher Gunther Bloch’s “Tuscany Dog Project” stray dog project, in which scientists undertook long-term behavioral observations of feral groups of domestic dogs in Tuscany. He remembers: “The dogs in Tuscany reacted to the first noise in the morning with an alarm barking, whereupon two of the dogs almost always started a chorus of howling.”
Kirchhoff suspects that the disposition to howl is probably genetic. Not all breeds of dogs howl. Nordic breeds, especially huskies, love to howl. Weimaraners and Labradors also have fun with the loud howling. Poodles and Eurasiers, on the other hand, do not.
However, howling can also be of territorial importance. On the one hand, dogs howl to help locate group members, according to Kirchhoff. “If a dog is separated from its group, it uses howling to establish contact with the others, who then usually respond.” On the other hand, dogs from outside the group would be howled at to mark their territory – according to the motto: “Here is our territory!”
Cry Along Instead of Stopping
The age at which a dog starts howling varies. Some start howling as puppies, others only when they are a few years old. The pitch is also individual. While the howling of wolves sounds very harmonious and synchronous, the choral howling of dogs is usually not very flattering to our ears. Because every four-legged friend howls in his own pitch. Manuela Albrecht compares it to a dialect – every dog speaks a different one.
If the four-legged friend howls as soon as the master or mistress leaves the house, the howling does not necessarily have to mean separation anxiety. Stefan Kirchhoff thinks that dogs may howl because they want their pack to be together. “Or they cry out of boredom or when they lose control,” says Manuela Albrecht. “And bitches in heat make males howl.”
If there really is a dispute with the neighbors, only training can help. “A dog should learn to stay alone or with only part of the human family and to relax at the same time,” advises the dog trainer. In an apartment building in particular, however, it is worth establishing a demolition signal for howling.
However, Albrecht has another suggestion for dealing with howling: “If you look at it from the point of view of communication, we humans should howl together with our dogs much more often instead of constantly correcting them.”