Distress cries are common across mammals, serving to attract caregiving attention. Although these calls often share structural similarities across species, they differ in pitch and frequency range. Domestic dogs are known to be highly responsive to human emotional cues, but how they distinguish between species-specific vocal signals has remained unclear.
Root-Gutteridge and colleagues (2021) examined how adult dogs reacted to recorded puppy and human infant distress cries played through a loudspeaker. Each sound was presented both in its natural pitch range and pitch-shifted to match the other species. The results were striking: dogs responded faster and showed greater attention to cries that fell within the natural canine frequency range, regardless of whether the sound originally came from a puppy or a baby.
Female dogs reacted more quickly and more strongly than males, perhaps reflecting evolutionary differences in parental care. Despite domestication increasing dogs’ general responsiveness to human emotions, they still showed a weaker response to human infant cries in their natural pitch range. The findings suggest that dogs use a fast but imperfect decision-making process when responding to distress sounds, relying heavily on acoustic frequency cues rather than emotional context.
Overall, the study highlights that while dogs can empathize across species, their perception of distress is still strongly tuned to canine-specific acoustic patterns. This may explain why dogs react more instinctively to the high-pitched whines of puppies than to the lower cries of human infants.
Source: Root-Gutteridge, H., Ratcliffe, V. F., Neumann, J., Timarchi, L., Yeung, C., Korzeniowska, A., Mathevon, N., & Reby, D. (2021). Effect of pitch range on dogs’ response to conspecific vs. heterospecific distress cries. Scientific Reports, 11, published October 5, 2021.
