If Dogs Could Speak, Would We Understand What They Are Saying?

The book “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are,” by Frans De Waal brings up this interesting question and takes a deep dive into how dramatically our perspective of the world differs from other animals, I highly recommend giving it a read. 

In his book he discusses the term Umwelt, coined by Dr. Urkze in 1909, meaning “The world as perceived by a particular organism.” It is a word that tries to capture and define the immense differences in how different animals (including humans) understand the world around them based on their unique natural characteristics. 

In all of my interactions with dogs I am aware of how dramatically different our umwelts are due to our relationship with olfaction. A dog “sees,” through smell, they use smell as a communication system, they can smell things that have happened in the past, they can smell your stress hormones, they can smell things out of sight. Meanwhile I rarely think about smell unless I’m irritated by it, hungry, or nostalgic. As a result of this the dog has a huge amount of information I do not have and  they find importance in things that are useless to me. If the dog could speak and explain their perspective based primarily off of olfaction, would it make any sense to us humans?

Olfaction is just one of many ways in which our unique biology as primates and candids fractures our lines of communication. It doesn’t mean that it is pointless to try to communicate with your dog, it just means that a good relationship with them comes from understanding their perspective and being mindful of where the similarities and  differences lie. 

I can only imagine it must be frustrating for dogs to have to live with us humans, with our weak olfactory systems, slow understanding of body language, and non-existent prey drive. How boring and stupid we must seem to them sometimes!