Dogs and telephones: mutually exclusive?
Photo: Bigstock

by Katerina Lorenzatos Makris ~

In this life there are certain indisputable facts. The sun rises in the east, peanut butter goes with jelly, and your dog who has been quiet all day will suddenly bark to wake the dead the minute you try to talk on the phone.

The dog-telephone connection has been observed for more than a century, ever since the invention of the instrument, often credited to Alexander Graham Barke.

Inventor of telephone predicted problem
Photo: Bigstock

In point of fact Barke predicted the problem in an early letter to a friend, remarking, “Tragically, there are millions of people across the globe for whom I doubt my newfangled contraption will be of much use. Those in households that contain canines will find it nearly impossible to conduct a conversation through any device designed for communication with the outside world.”

Puzzling question

Despite the long-standing, widespread acknowledgment that dogs and telephones are mutually exclusive, it wasn’t until recently that researchers looked into the puzzle of why this is the case.

Dr. Willem P. van der Woof and his team of canine sociologists at Hond University of the Netherlands announced yesterday that they have completed a nine-year study, “Telephones, Dogs, and the Dynamics of Distraction, Disillusion, and Dystopia.”

“We discovered that it’s a simple yet a complex question,” van der Woof told Spicy Stories Save Lives in a *telephone interview, “as are most questions in the canine world.”

[*Spicy Stories is pretty sure that’s what van der Woof said but not 100% because several canines in the Spicy Stories offices were vocalizing at the time.]

Dogs want to join the conversation?
Photo: Bigstock

Survey results

In a survey of *3,576 randomly selected dogs from a variety of breeds throughout the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden, van der Woof gathered the following answers from participants in response to the question, “Why do you bark when your human is on the telephone?”

[*Spicy Stories is pretty sure that van der Woof said the number 3,576 but it might have been some other number not accurately noted due to the reason stated above.]

. 4% of dogs surveyed said they were not barking, just clearing their throats.

. 16% said they believe their humans are talking to themselves when they speak on the telephone, thereby exhibiting signs of mental illness and/or dementia. Barking in those cases is a strategy to “disrupt” the unbalanced human behavior, to “distract and disengage” the humans from their fantasy worlds, to “bring the humans back to reality,” and to reassure the humans that they, the dogs, can “assist them in surviving and overcoming their psychological dysfunction.”

Humans can’t be trusted with telephones?
Photo: Bigstock

. 27% of survey respondents said they feel it is dangerous for humans to speak on the telephone for more than about one to three minutes because any amount of time beyond that point “generally causes people to lose their focus on dogs as the center of the universe” and every time that happens, history has shown that great calamities have befallen the earth, including but not limited to the destruction of Babylon, World War Two, the Indian Ocean tsunami, and Miley Cyrus’s performance on the MTV Music Video Awards.

. 53% said they simply wish to add their thoughts to the telephone conversation, for example:

“Please tell Aunt Maggie that I really liked the home-baked carob chip cookies she sent for my birthday and that she needs to send more.”

“Please tell your bank that I agree with you that it sucks that they charge so much for a box of new checks. But no you do not know for a fact that it was me who chewed the old ones into infinitesimal shreds that you found all over the sofa when you came home from that party to which you shouldn’t have gone without me by the way.”

“If that is your ex-boyfriend please tell him that due to the buckets of tears through which I have been required to console you, if he ever shows his face here again I hope he has finally found some dunce of an employer to hire him and has caught up on his health insurance bills that you used to have to pay for him, because if you are so silly as to open the door even the slightest crack when he arrives he might need to make a trip to the emergency room. Stitches could be required.”

Dogs and disasters

Van der Woof said his team has received funding from Companion Animal Knowledge Enterprises (CAKE), a British lobbying firm, to continue the study into a second phase, during which they will explore the possible causal effect that human telephone usage and lack of attention to dogs may have upon geopolitical instability, meteorological disturbances, and astronomical phenomena such as solar flares and supernovas.

[He said a couple of things after that which may or may not have been important but they were not heard by Spicy Stories due to the reason stated above.]

“Dogs, Telephones, and the Dynamics of Distraction, Dysfunction, and Dystopia” will be published later this month in the Canine Journal of Sociology, Motivation, and Really Good Things to Eat.

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For example we help Kefalonia Animal Trust (KATs) provide free spay/neuter for hundreds of animals per year, which is one of the best ways to prevent the abandonment and misery of puppies like Noah and Kyla. Please give to KATs via PayPal or bank transfer. Spay/neuter and education are the animals’ best hope for a better future.

Also please consider Animal Rescue Kefalonia (ARK), another group on the island who run a shelter  and work miracles with terribly few resources. 

Spicy Stories Save Lives and the author of this article have no affiliation with the rescue groups mentioned above, other than as a friend, volunteer, and donor.

Seen our book?  Your Adopted Dog: Everything You Need to Know About Rescuing and Caring for a Best Friend in Need, by Shelley Frost and Katerina Lorenzatos Makris, available through Amazon.com.