They are creatures of few “words” yet dogs communicate easily with canines everywhere, and with most humans. If you and your dog were to travel to a foreign country, knowing nothing of its language and culture, you would have a hard time communicating. You would have to abandon your vast verbal vocabulary and resort to making basic gestures – hoping that none of them are culturally offensive.
Your dog, however, upon meeting a foreign dog, would be able to know through body language what each other’s social status is, through sniffs their age and sex, what they ate, their general health, where they’ve been, and availability to mate. Then, should it be necessary, through barks or growls, they can also determine how friendly or aggressive the other dog is and how they should proceed with the relationship.
A dog’s primary communication is first through scent, then body language, and then his vocal sounds such as barking, growling and whining. In the wild, dogs bark to call the pack together, alert each other to danger or to a delightful food find. Dogs living with humans quickly figure out that communicating to us through scent is useless – we’ll never appreciate the detailed messages embedded in urine on a fencepost. So our dogs speak to us through body language, because we understand it fairly well, and through barking, because it definitely gets our attention.
Continued: All Dogs Share a Universal Barking Language