What is a dog thinking when he barks? Is a dog thinking when he barks?

I was sitting on the couch when Barley jumped up and started barking out the window. It was a low bark, mixed with a growl. His tense body leaned forward and he ignored me completely when I said, “It’s fine Barley, it’s just Dan. We’re fine.” 

After a few seconds, he apparently registered that it was my husband, and he stopped barking and his body relaxed. And then the wheels in my head started turning as they tend to do when any animal does… anything. What just happened in Barley?

Clearly, Barley felt an overwhelming urge to bark upon seeing a body move outside the window of the room we were sitting in. Why? For thousands of years, dogs have guarded humans and their property. Many think guarding is one of the original reasons people started keeping dogs around, and some breeds have been selected just for this guarding role. So I wasn’t surprised that he barked aggressively at the person who appeared just outside the window. But I wondered what was going on in his head, and what it felt like to be him.

A bark is just a bark, isn’t it?

Maybe you’re thinking that it’s obvious. He either wanted to scare away the person, or alert me, or both. But what was he thinking? Was he thinking or was he just responding to a feeling? He doesn’t know what a strange person appearing outside of my window could do to me personally, to the kids, or to our home. I’m certain dogs don’t have concepts of assault or understand the risks to personal property. So what was going on inside Barley? 

There are few ways we could think about this. (That is if you’re interested and still with me. I have been told that I overthink things.) Some researchers explain animal behavior by thinking about cues or triggers and the fixed (inflexible) behavioral responses that follow. That camp might assume that there is some kind of genetic rule in Barley that functions something like “see an unidentified or unfamiliar person in my territory, bark aggressively.”  It doesn’t give the animals much credit for reasoning, but it does explain some instinctive behaviors (like how a mom licks newborn puppies to get their bodies working outside the womb). I started with this way of thinking. Is it possible that this could be a rule programmed in Barley’s genetics? 

If so, then dogs should bark when their humans are not home. They should bark equally intensely if it is their most beloved person on the couch or an inanimate doll. They shouldn’t bark in the same way if a stranger walks up to another house. They should not bark in the same way if a familiar person approaches their house. Is that what we see? 

Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer. I checked what’s been published and I informally surveyed some colleagues, and it seems nobody has done an experiment to measure whether dog barking intensity changes based on who is home. I would love to see that study done. There are a lot of reasons this would be a logistically tricky and complicated experiment… but I’m hoping it’s on the way. 

Dog brains process unfamiliar faces differently

So that this post contains more than my random musings, I will share a related study published earlier this year that showed that specific regions of dogs’ brains that were involved in processing rewarding experiences, familiarity and emotion responded differently depending on whether dogs saw faces of familiar people or strangers. 

Researchers from Auburn University studied dogs who were trained to lay still for several minutes in an fMRI scanner while they viewed videos of familiar people (their trainers) and strangers. (Are you pausing and thinking about how impressive it is that these dogs could lay still in a scanner?! The dogs were clicker trained using positive training methods.) Researchers found that areas of the brain that are typically associated with rewarding experiences, familiarity and emotion processing were more active when dogs viewed familiar faces compared to strangers.

The researchers also took it a step further. They measured how strongly bonded the dogs were with the familiar people by giving dogs an unsolvable task and measuring how often they looked to their familiar trainer (compared to a stranger) when they couldn’t solve it. (You know the look you get from your dog sometimes… the “I don’t have thumbs, this is your job!”-look? That’s what you can picture here.) The more the dogs looked to the familiar person, the researchers reasoned, the more they were behaving as though they could rely on that familiar person for help. Indeed, the researchers found that the dogs’ brain activation was stronger in response to images of people with whom they shared stronger bonds.

So… I still don’t have an answer to what Barley is thinking and feeling when he is barking at people near the house, but the study above and dozens of others give us reason to believe there may be some amount of thoughtfulness mixed into their reactions. It’s fascinating to think that there are still things we don’t understand about the minds of our close animal companions. If you have thoughts to share (or, thoughts on your dog’s thoughts), feel free to do so in our Facebook Group or in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

Article

Thompkins, A. M., Lazarowski, L., Ramaiahgari, B., Gotoor, S. S. R., Waggoner, P., Denney, T. S., Gopikrishna, D., & Katz, J. S. (2021). Dog–human social relationship: representation of human face familiarity and emotions in the dog brain. Animal Cognition, 24(2), 251-266. Link to article.