Boop.
We’ve got woofing good news for anyone who likes to talk to their pupper in their special pupper voice.
Your very good boy or very good girl really likes it. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. They wuve it, they weally, weally wuve it.
You see, some very clever humans conducted an experiment with both some puppers (puppies) and some doggos (adult dogs) and some women (humans).
Some of them were big woofers and some of them were tiny doggos.
The humans then published their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal in January 2017 for other humans to read.
To conduct their experiment they gave the humans 90 photos of some puppies (30), some adult dogs (30), and some much older woofers (30).
Sorry to all the parents of fur babies, but they’re just animals. The Mamamia Out Loud team discuss. Post continues.
They then recorded said humans saying the following words while looking at the different photos:
“Hi!”
“Hello cutie!”
“Who’s a good boy?”
“Come here! Good boy! Yes! Come here sweetie pie! What a good boy!”
They also got them to say the same phrases while looking directly at the researchers.
The result? When talking to dogs of any size, people used a higher tone of voice (their special pupper voice) and they also varied their pitch more than they did when looking at an adult human.
While they used their special pupper voice when looking at photos of dogs of any size, it was even more pronounced when it was a photo of a wee pupper.
The humans’ pitch actually went up by an average of 13 per cent with old dogs (big ole’ woofers), 11 per cent with adult dogs (doggos) and 21 per cent with puppies (wee lil’ puppers).
Once they were done with the human part of the experiment, they got to the good bit… the doggos.
The researchers, Tobey Ben-Aderet, Mario Gallego-Abenza, David Reby, Nicolas Mathevon, used a loudspeaker to play the humans’ recordings for 10 doggos and 10 puppers at the Bideawee animal shelter in Manhattan, New York City. They also played them for dogs who lived with their humans in France and Italy.
During the experiment they found the puppers were more responsive when they heard people speaking in their special pupper voice or special doggo voice, than if they heard them speaking in their normal adult voice.
They were “reacting more quickly, looking more often at the loudspeaker and approaching it closer for longer periods”.
Where as the older doggos responded pretty much the same way to the special pupper voices and the normal adult voices (i.e. they’re too old for this shit).
Basically, they concluded that humans have a special voice for puppers… and puppers love it.
Another recent study, published in PLOS, discovered that doggos often take on parts of their human’s personality.
This comes in addition to previous research, which has shown dogs are aware of and respond to the energy we express – for instance, if we are stressed or relaxed. It also established we often choose dogs with similar physical attributes to ourselves; from their body weight to the shape of their eyes.
Yep, we’re creating lil’ pupper versions of ourselves and then talking to them in our special pupper voices.
So please, go forth and tell your pupper what a very good boy he is. Yes, he is. Yes, he is. Who’s a good boy? You are. You are.
Mamamia has also partnered with Room to Read, where you can keep a girl in school for just $1 a day. Educating women and girls is widely understood to be the most powerful and effective way to address global poverty.
You can help make the world a better place for women and girls by donating at www.roomtoread.org/mamamia