Sometimes, I like to think about the question, do dogs have a sense of humor? This is not a very easy question to answer, because we can quickly slip into anthropomorphism, or ascribing human-like qualities to animals without any evidence. But is there any evidence that dogs have a sense of humor?
From a personal standpoint, I can relate many stories of apparent sense of humor in dogs. When I play with my dog Raja, who loves to chase balls, he can sometimes invent games that make me laugh. One game that he invented is pretending that he cannot find the ball. He will sometimes stand right over the ball and look all around as if he can’t find it. He turns one way, then another way, all the time standing right over the ball. Then, suddenly, he “discovers” the ball that was touching his feet and grabs it. He doesn’t do this all the time. Sometimes days or weeks go by before he repeats this game, and then he might do it for several days straight, until he apparently gets bored with it and goes back to running after the ball and retrieving it. Another game that he invented is tripping on the way to get the ball. He will deliberately trip and slide about half-way to the ball, and then trip and slide about half-way back with the ball. This always reminds me of slapstick comedy, and I break out in peals of laughter.
So how do I know that he thinks it’s humor? As he does this, he starts to pant rhythmically. At first, I noticed this behavior but did not realize that it had any sort of meaning. Then I read about the work of Patricia Simonet and her studies of laughter in dogs. She has found that dogs will produce a distinctive pattern of pants when they are playing, or when they are interacting with friendly people. This pattern is different from the panting that dogs do when they are hot or when they have been running. I don’t think that it is a large leap of faith to assume that if dogs can laugh, they can have a sense of humor.
However, ultimately, there is no way yet of conclusively proving this. But if they can laugh, it suggests that they might very well have one. At least with my dog, I laugh and he pants, and we both have a good time playing.
---Con Slobodchikoff
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