I don’t know if they are necessarily intended to provoke. Some are definitely intended to warn and I think greet sometimes as well based on my own dogs’ barks.
I’d say that depends on the warning bark and my dogs have more than one kind. There are kinds they seem to do to sound fierce and there are kinds they seem to do in order to get my attention.
But the greeting bark is definitely not provocative, it’s just “open the door now now now now now pet me!”
It’s almost like an emotional state. What is complex for dogs is smell, the way they read the local bulletins pissted by all the locals, their health, their fertility, what they have been eating, their emotional state. And then they can leave their own peemail for others to smell and get all the latest community news :)
Any good dog owner pretty quickly learns what a dog’s bark means most of the time. Also, I’m not sure a bark alone without the body language to go with it is really all that helpful. I can tell so much more from my dogs’ body language including things like when they’re looking for a place to poo on a walk as opposed to just walking around and sniffing stuff.
You also would be a lot less likely to know that one of my dogs is super angry if you didn’t know that her hair stands up like she has a great big stripe down her back when she does.
Because that’s how a lone dog learns to communicate with you. That doesn’t mean that their bark doesn’t communicate things you cannot understand…
I would imagine this will eventually show the socialization of dogs. I can’t imagine my dog, who was rescued from Hurricane Harvey in some woods in Oklahoma has many distinctive features in her barks. She would have only briefly knew her mother, otherwise she has only grown up around humans and cats.
I am sure its vastly different than other dog’s barks, just like the body language is.
But why would they use the bark as communication, if they communicate fine with body language? It’s pretty obvious my dog is aloof to other dogs when we are at outings, she wants to join in but can’t figure out how to act more often than not.
Then there are the other dog’s who do seem to communicate, verbally and else wise.
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