We are away from our home this holiday weekend, but have someone staying at our house. Our Great Dane, Gunner, trends to get very depressed when I’m gone. We are best buddies and spend most of every day together. I call everyday and I’m put on speaker so I can talk to Gunner. However he never seems to react in the slightest to my voice. If I’m home in another room and call him he of course reacts, so why doesn’t he recognize my voice on the phone?
Also, can dogs see pictures say on a phone screen and recognize who it is? I’ve showed Gunner pictures and zero reaction. Can they see it, but don’t understand?
Your dog doesn’t understand language, so its brain does not convert the sounds it hears into representations of analogous words. The reason you can recognize what you hear on the telephone as a human voice is because it forms words that are markers of human speech. Converting the sounds you hear on the phone into the sounds that comprise the phonemes of your language is an acquired skill. Telephones imperfectly convert phonemes going in into phonemes going out, not necessarily equivalent enough for a dog to recognize them, nor even a person who does not speak your language fluently, which is why it;s harder to understand a foreigner on the phone, than face to face. A lot like easily reading a sentence where all the words are spelled with letters in the wrong order. Your eye bypasses the defects and focuses on the relevant analogies. Dogs ears don’t know how to do that. Dogs often do not recognize their own name, when called by a stranger.
Phones also don’t transmit all of the sound, just the portion most easily heard by humans. But to dogs, who have a wider range of hearing, it might not sound like you at all.
Dogs are hardwired to exquisitely read body language. That they recognise words, sounds and images at all is a sign that they are much better at figuring out how to read their humans than their humans are willing to learn their body language.
In other words, Gunner probably doesn’t give a shit about your voice, or your pictures because you IRL is what he understands. Most likely you have not given much thought or effort to communicating with Gunner with body language that he understands so it’s mostly a one-way communication with Gunner doing most of the work. His “depression” in your absence is probably your construct and not his reality.
Possibly, but when I’ve left before for a week he’s refused to eat, play and was generally not himself until I returned. Possibly not depression, but certainly something. Interesting thoughts on why he can’t understand the phone conversations.
Oh, animals definitely know when their owners leave. My mother was dog-sitting for our neighbor and his dog would get all excited whenever she heard a motorcycle, and when it wasn’t him, she’d go and mope in the bedroom. Animals are smarter than you think.
As for recognizing your voice, I don’t know about dogs, but cats can. Once, when my sister was away at college, she called home and my mother happened to be sitting beside one of our cats. Buffy heard my sister’s voice and started getting all excited and was purring and rubbing up against the phone. After that, whever Baby Sis would call, she’d “talk” to Buffy, who definitely recognized her voice. And she knew who it was, since she’s terrified of strangers, so if she didn’t recognize the voice, she’d go and hide.
I know it’s not the same as a dog, but at least you know some pets can.
My dogs react with cocked heads to my voice over the phone or Skype. My cats don’t.
However, they don’t answer back, and they lose interest after a minute. They know it’s me and they know I’m not there. Image means nothing.
One of my cats does react to images, but not images of me–images of things cats like to chase and images of other cats. (Okay I have a video made for cats that I bought, don’t judge.)
Many studies suggest that both dogs and cats recognize recordings of their owner’s voices.
Dogs not only recognize the voice, evidence also suggests they can match a photo of their owner to a recording of their voice. (Adachi et al 2007)
Why Gunner doesn’t seem to react to the OP’s voice over the phone may be due to low quality reproduction of sound through the speaker, or him knowing the OP is not really there despite recognizing his voice, or an inhibition of any response caused by the person staying at the house and operating the speaker, or any number of other reasons. But it isn’t because dogs can’t recognize their owner’s disembodied voice in general.
My dog reacts differently to sound over speakers, specifically: she is not scared of loud bangs when they are over speakers. As Chronos said, I think this is because it doesn’t transmit all the sound so she doesn’t recognise it as “scary bang”. She also doesn’t enjoy music over speakers, while she loves live piano music.
OTOH, she does recognise my voice over the phone. But honestly, you should perhaps be glad Gunner doesn’t. My mother used to hold the phone up to her ear, and she would run to the door barking, then run around the house, frantically searching and barking a high-pitched, angry bark. She would end up just barking at my mother, looking at her as if she should produce me from behind her back. After a few times she started to hate the phone. When my mother held it out for her she would shy away. I think to her it was a lie: gracer isn’t really there.
As to why she reacts differently to the speaker sounds, I think she does hear the bangs and the music, but she recognises that it isn’t real, and the music doesn’t sound as nice. My mother would say my name while holding out the phone, and then she would hear something like me, though not quite the same, so she would look for me. I think Gunner probably just hears it and doesn’t think it’s real, or close enough to your voice to make sense. That’s just what I think though. Sorry to be so IMHO in GQ.
when my dog wants to go out in the backyard, he sits by the back door and barks until i open the door for him and he can go out
in some way the dog translates a thought (i want to go out) to language (he barks) to an expected outcome (i will open the door), that sounds like some concept of language on the animal’s part
btw the dog is a german shepherd supposedly the smartest breed
my german shepherd/collie mix is currently chasing his own tail. I’m not sure what that says about his smarts.
Personal anecdote:
We have three dogs: an akita, a black lab, and a german shepherd mix. Of the three, only the german shepherd has ever reacted to speech over the phone. When my sister was away, he reacted to her calling his name over the cellphone. He cocked his head, and then barked at the phone, and then barked at me. It seemed to confuse him more than anything.
I’ve never had either one of them have the slightest reaction to a photo, or a movie of a person - though the lab has barked at the TV’s doorbell ringing.
When my sister got one of those full-body mirrors, the akita tried attacking her own reflection, the lab stared at it, and the german shepherd tried going behind the mirror, and after finding nothing there, started ignoring it.
My mom’s shih-tzu Lucee Loo, whom I have bonded with very strongly over the years, definitely recognizes my voice on the phone, and as my mom tells, it will get very excited when she does.
Once when we had a new stereo we could call the dog from one speaker to the other; he definitely reacted to my voice. We had to quit because it was so cruel that he couldn’t find me.
I’ll bet your dog seriously (and exasperatedly) overestimates your feeble human capacity to read his body language or understand the subtleties of his vocalizations.
I sometimes reflect on how exasperating it must be to be a pet dog. My master just disappears for no apparent reason, with no clue as to how long I will be expected to hold my pee, and without turning on Animal Planet before they go. The best communication I can get from him is some inane baby talk when he stops pronouncing his Rs. Being taken for walks, jerked past all the neat new smells along the same boring old pavement. Having to stop and listen to all their stupid friends, who also abandon their Rs when they stoop over and pretend I’m nearly deaf and they have to raise their voice in both pitch and volume. And then they call me on the bloody tablet, and expect me to think they are home. Sometimes I think it’s not me who needs a veterinary psychiatrist.
(Suicide) When my dog wanted to go out (dif dog than previous) he would quietly sit by the door and wait until someone noticed. I told him many times he had to SAY something.
There is now a bronze statue commemorating Hachikō at Shibuya Station. He never stopped coming to the station until he died, and was buried in his own grave beside Professor Ueno.
Shortly after my mother’s death, I was going through my answering machine tape (yeah, that long ago), and I got to one of my mother’s messages. My cat immediately recognized her voice, and started darting around, knowing that she had to be *somewhere *in the room, that she couldn’t be hiding in that little box.
Another time, I was Photoshopping an image of the cat he grew up with, who was also deceased. He definitely recognized him, but lost interest after about 5 seconds. He never reacted at all to photos of other cats.