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The rare non-barking Cairn ?
Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark
"Do Cairns bark much?" is probably the number one prospective puppy buyer question, just ahead of, "Do you have to groom them?"
The short answer, which I try to avoid giving, has to do with the Pope being Catholic. The longer answer, like Cairns themselves, is more complex. It depends on the Cairn; it depends on the pack in which the Cairn finds itself; it depends upon the Cairn's surroundings.
Our Cairns' surroundings, for example, include three cats, the Burmese princess Lida Rose and her two half-breed sons, Bob and Ray. The cats lived here before the dogs arrived; they continue to live here, precariously, amidst the Cairns. The cats are willing to tolerate the dogs; the dogs show no such tolerance. They see the cats as some form of badger or fox and do their best, barking all the way, to drive them into trees or onto fences where we can get a clear shot at them. We are a great disappointment to our dogs because, instead of shooting the cats, we attach leashes to the dogs and haul them away, under protest. (For a small dog, a Cairn has incredibly powerful hydraulic brakes when it doesn't want to go somewhere.)
A hundred years ago, the forefathers and foremothers of our dogs, working in hysterical packs, pursued badgers underground, their shrill barks telling their masters above ground where they were. A good, loud bark was essential to a working Terrier. The rare non-barking Cairn-to-be was culled as worthless.
Now we are stuck with the results of that selective breeding. And we are stuck in a smaller environment. Instead of surveying a far-off pack of dogs in hot pursuit, almost out of earshot, their faint barks made melodious by distance, my neighbors, thirty yards away, grit their teeth when my loud quartet shouts at Ray. Ray likes to sit on the very fence I built to keep my dogs from straying, as he amiably surveys the yapping group just below him.
But the Ray-barkers produce nowhere near the sound I extracted once from twenty-six Rossardens. Pat and I were sitting in Charlie Dixon's lovely garden on a splendid, sunny afternoon when I sneezed. (A word about my sneezes: Pat says I should never sneeze with my mouth open. I reply that if I did not open my mouth to relieve some of the pressure, my ears would probably be blown off.) Have you ever seen that demonstration of a nuclear explosion where they put eight gazillion mouse traps wall to wall in a room, each holding a ping pong ball, then throw a precipitating ping pong ball into the room? First one trap pops, then two, then four, then . . . you get the idea. My sneeze caused Charlie's kennel to go nuclear. My ears go numb at the memory.
But Cairns do not always bark in packs; they are quite capable of barking all by themselves. At what do they bark? It depends upon the dog. Some Cairns, bless their atypical natures, are reluctant to bark. Others, like our Merlot (a Rossarden, coincidentally), appear to have a daily quota of barks stored within them, and must disgorge them or burst. She has never come close to bursting. Our other dogs require some stimulus; Merlot barks before she has anything to bark at. Hadley the Glass- Shatterer barks at UPS trucks and at Merlot; Henry the Intimidator barks a lot at the thought of dinner, believing that, without his announcements, dinner would never come. Lucy the Bellower, who looks a little like a Cairn version of Marlene Dietrich, has the same sort of deep voice; she will bark at cats, at leaves, at sudden noises, at just about anything, but can be silenced by the possibility of food.
So, barking is A Problem for Cairn owners. New Cairn owners usually get to meet neighbors they have not met before and to discover that those neighbors are prey to interesting psychological and physical quirks. Our neighbor two houses away suffers from migraine headaches, for example, a condition not improved when Hadley shrieks at Ray. A friend has a neighbor who so dislikes Cairn barks that she sneaks over to her fence and barks at the Cairns on the other side, hoping to set them off so she can complain about them.
Fortunately, barking is not a problem without solutions. Several are available.
The first solution is to avoid selling Cairn puppies to people who plan to leave them outdoors all day. (The British Cairn clubs recommend that Cairns not be sold to people who will abandon them during working hours.) Cairns can be left indoors for long chunks of time, however. We can leave ours loose in separate rooms in the house (after Lucy-proofing the place by moving edible objects like socks and the TV Guide out of her reach) for several hours.
The second solution is to listen for the dogs when they are outdoors. Pat and I have adopted a Three Barks and You're In policy, which works pretty well. We keep bowls of air-popped popcorn at the front and back door, and when the dogs bark three times, collectively or individually, one of us goes to the door, whistles, and they usually come running. Cairns love popcorn even more than barking most of the time.
The third solution is to remind neighbors that dogs are the greatest burglar deterrent known to man. Burglars themselves say that, although I am not convinced of the reliability of the word of professional thieves. But a houseful of Cairns is a house which burglars avoid. Ours certainly cause meter-readers and mail persons to treat us with respect. The only problem with Cairns as crime-fighters is that off-duty Cairns are not willing to deter anything; Lida Rose, the mortal enemy of our merry little band, can wander within inches of Henrys cage, yowling, once Henry has punched out for the day without extracting so much as a mild woof.
More extreme solutions are possible, of course. Anti-bark collars are favored by many, as are the physical removal of the dogs' vocal cords. And, if we were forced by extreme circumstances to such extreme solutions, we would probably consider them. Meanwhile, we enjoy the barking of our Cairns as we enjoy almost everything else about them. Like the Cairns themselves, their barks are spontaneous and vital, a part of the music with which they fill our lives.
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Basenjis...Their "bark" sounds more like a yodel. Quite funny actually...