Guest column: Why do (some) dog"s howl?

(Today’s guest post was written by Kathryn Campbell)

Not too long ago, I looked out from the second floor window of our house to see my two dogs sunbathing in the backyard. Just then the firehouse siren started to wail and my younger dog, Angus, sat up, alert and on guard. As the siren grew louder, Angus, a skinny, nervous black lab, threw back his head and wailed along with it. I am here, he seemed to howl. Malcolm, the older of the two, stayed in his relaxed position, unfazed by the display. He even glanced away, in what looked like a bit of an eye roll.

I watched Angus for a while as he kept up howling in the brilliant daylight and wondered: Why howling?

As long as I have had dogs I have been curious about what they think and why they act the way they do. One black and white photo from the early 1970s shows me at about 4 years old, nose to nose with our Airedale Terrier, Prince. The conversation has long vanished, but in the picture it looks like we both agreed on whatever the topic. Friendship? Loyalty? Love?  An understanding.

Now, when just the thought of taking Angus on his walk enters my mind, he scurries in and stares intensely up at me. I don’t even need to say, walk, which I think is odd. When the kids come home from school, both dogs show uncontained joy, as though the kids had left years ago and there they were waiting, never giving up hope of their return.

Malcolm always has been more of a soldier, a great guardian who never cared for contractors or dishwasher repairmen or any stranger who had the sorry task of fixing something in our house.

No matter how friendly they seemed, or how they greeted him and said ‘what a good-looking Lab’, he was unmoved. He would grow very still, his ears would flatten and he would stare, never leaving my side. Yet when the kids were babies, and even now, when they flop over him, sling their arms around his neck, kiss his head, he shows his quiet approval, a steady tail thump, a happy yawn. How our dogs perceive us and communicate with us, two strange and separate species in one home, was always a wonder to me.

So what’s with the howling? Angus seems his true, primal self when he howls. Not the same dog who is afraid of plastic bags and wind. The little I could find about howling mostly pointed to ‘connection with the wolf lineage’ or defending territory from unseen intruders. I remembered, too, my parents telling me when my brothers and sister and I were young our family lived through an earthquake. Moments before the ground began to tremble, all the dogs in the neighborhood cried out a warning in an eerie chorus of howls.

There is little published research on why dogs howl, said Camille Ward, a canine expert and psychologist at the University of Michigan. But there are hypotheses. Not all dogs howl, but those who do could be anxious or fearful. Dogs who suffer from separation anxiety become extremely panicked when their guardian leaves them alone, Ward said. As a result, they often howl and bark. “The howling is a sign of their distress but it may also be a means by which a distressed dog tries to reconnect up with his or her group,” she said. “The sound of a droning siren may, in fact, sound like a howl to a dog. That dog may be responding the way that her wolf ancestor would have responded to the distant howl of a pack mate by howling back. Howling behavior in dogs could simply be a remnant of their evolutionary heritage irrespective of whether or not it serves a function in their domestic milieu.”

Brian Hare, Associate Professor Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Evolutionary Anthropology, Arts & Sciences DIBS Faculty, Member, DIBS Center at Duke University agreed. “Dogs howl because they evolved from wolves who howl,” said Hare. But answers as to a specific purpose of howling are elusive. “We suspect it likely is a social long call that many species possess to communicate (over) long distances one’s presence to others.”

Lately, though, most of my focus is on the non-howler, Malcolm, who is nine. He has bone cancer in his front left leg.

It appeared overnight in April as a golf-ball sized lump and since then has exploded into a softball-sized mass. When he starts to take weight off the leg, our vet told us in April, you will have to euthanize him. It wouldn’t help, he said, to put him through the agony of an amputation that will only buy him a few more months. The cancer likely had spread throughout his body like ashes in an updraft. So, we wait.

He has seemed well on all other fronts except that he walks more slowly and sleeps all day. He heads to the back yard, lies down underneath an azalea bush, breathes out a big huff and stays there in the cool dirt. My husband brushes his hair. It rises and floats across the yard, picked up by birds by the next morning. We bring fresh water.

Three times a day we tuck Tylenol with Codeine into turkey and peanut butter sandwiches. We watch and wait until he gulps it whole. On the weekends, we buy beef bones at the Farmer’s Market for him to happily gnaw. In return, he looks at us, with what I can only describe as compassion, as we circle him, flustered, helpless. I guess he looks at us with love? I am pretty sure I am right about that. The months have been, in many ways, a daily goodbye. In the quiet of the night I wonder how my family will do that last day, when it does come, which will be soon. The next time the siren blows maybe we will want to join Angus in a lonely, lost call. A howl.

(Editors note: Kate Campbell’s dog, Malcolm, the one who didn’t howl, died Thursday.)

(Kate Campbell is a writer and editor.  She was a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and has written for The Boston Globe, The Scientist Magazine, People Magazine, The Writer Magazine and The Philadelphia Business Journal. You can learn more about her work at www.kathryncampbell.org.)

(Photos courtesy of Kate Campbell)