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Why do dogs bark? Anyone woken in the small hours by their neighbour’s
pet has asked that question, and behavioural biologists think they have
the answer: dogs bark because they never grow up.

Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs think the domestic dog evolved from the wolf, yet the wolf
and other wild dogs seldom bark. ‘In the scientific literature you’d be
told that the coyote was heard to bark once and then there’s a three-page
description of it,’ says Mark Feinstein, of Hampshire College, Massachusetts.
Compare that to the seven hours’ nonstop barking recorded for one sheepdog
or the 907 barks in ten minutes of a cocker spaniel.

Barking is puzzling to behavioural bio-logists. Analysis of the sounds
in a bark suggests that it is somewhere between a puppy’s distress call
and an aggressive growl – as if every bark says ‘come here, go away’. ‘Why
would an animal spend such an extraordinary amount of energy letting the
entire world know it’s indecisive?’ asks Feinstein.

One clue comes from a Russian breeding experiment. Starting with wild
foxes, Dmitry Belyaev repeatedly bred the least timid foxes together, and
after 20 generations, the animals were tame. They also had traits such as
upturned tails and floppy, puppy-like ears. They even started to sound like
dogs. ‘In some ways, Belyaev re-created the dog,’ says Arnold Coppinger,
also of Hampshire College.

Something similar probably happened when dogs first evolved, Feinstein
and Coppinger propose. Bolder wolves had more success stealing scraps from
villages. Later, as people and dogs began to live together, dogs that begged
were rewarded with more food. With selection for tameness came other characters
that we think of as doggish.

Why should barking come with tameness? Probably because tameness – begging
for food, for instance – is juvenile behaviour; wild wolf pups beg from
their mothers. Wolf pups also bark, though they soon give it up. But, if
you select for prolonged adolescence, say Feinstein and Coppinger, you’ll
get a lifelong tame barker – a dog.