Page 120 - Showsight April 2013

and the tilted angle of the mouth
which stretches almost from ear
to ear give a still stronger impres-
sion of laughing. This ‘laughing’
is most often seen in dogs playing
with an adored master and which
become so excit-
ed that they soon
start panting”.
Jane Goodall
described this breathy panting as
laughter in the chimps that she
observed – panting which could
escalate into a more “ah-grunting”
sort of sounds if the play became
more intense. Primate observers
agree that this “laughter” sounds
like heavy breathing, but is a sig-
nal to others in their group of the
animal’s happy mood and playful
intentions. The laughter of dogs
serves the very same purpose.
Researcher Patricia Simonet
of Sierra Nevada College in Lake
Tahoe studied the sounds of
laughter in dogs. Her team used
a parabolic microphone to record
the sounds of dogs playing while
maintaining sufficient distance
from the dogs so as not to influ-
ence their behavior in any way.
In describing the laughter sounds
of dogs she says that, “To an
untrained human ear, it sounds
much like a pant, ‘hhuh, hhuh.”
However, when analyzing these
sounds, she discovered that the
exhalation bursts expand into
broader frequencies than normal
dog panting. What’s more, when
Simonet played these “laughing
sounds” to a group of fifteen pup-
pies, the pups romped in pure joy
at the sound of the dog laughter
Have you seen those video clips
of chimpanzees or orangutans
with big, open-mouth grins, and
panting happily as they thor-
oughly relish the being tickled
by their human care giver? That
footage always makes me chuckle!
For decades scientists debated as
to whether or not that behavior
qualified as laughter. Ethologists,
those researchers who study ani-
mal behavior (especially in a nat-
ural setting) didn’t want to label
primate behavior that resulted
from interaction with humans
as “natural”. However, as Jane
Goodall and subsequent research-
ers observed this same laugh-
ing behavior among wild pri-
mates, mainstream science had to
acknowledge that animals other
than humans can laugh.
When dog owners and train-
ers suggested that domestic dogs
could also laugh, the scientific
community claimed that we were
anthropomorphizing. In oth-
er words, we were erroneously
attributing human behavior to
canines. But even pioneer etholo-
gist, Konrad Lorenz, suggested
that dogs could laugh. In his book,
Man Meets Dog, Lorenz described
it this way:
“...an invitation to play always
follows; here the slightly opened
jaws which reveal the tongue,
Can Dogs Laugh?
T his ‘laughing’ is most often
seen in dogs playing with
an adored master and which
become so excited that they soon
start panting.
120 • ShowSight Magazine, April 2013