Why dogs can’t dance

“Why can’t dogs dance?” was the question that cognitive biology professor W. Tecumseh Fitch posed the scientific community in 2006. In the scientific field at that time, there was no evidence that any animals, apart from humans, were able to dance. That is, if dancing meant the ability to synchronize motor movements with the rhythm of music. This presented a paradox. Why is a phenomenon that seems so simple, so rare in nature?

The production of rhythmic sounds and movements is common among animals. We see it when crickets stridulate by rubbing their wings, when silverback gorillas beat their chests with their fists, or when indri lemurs vocalize to communicate with their group. Rats and monkeys have also been trained to press a lever to the rhythm of a metronome. But being able to identify the rhythm in complex music, with no instruments to mark it, and to move voluntarily in time to the beat, is beyond most creatures.

There is something here that is self-evident: to be able to dance to the rhythm of a melody, you need melodies with rhythm. And melodies with rhythm need humans to make them. In our species, music can be something individual, but above all, it is a collective activity. We need to hear a rhythm. It is very difficult to coordinate an entire orchestra, a rock group, or a choir if there is no continuous pulse to follow. Nobody expects to go through the jungle and find a group of monkeys dancing, and besides, in the jungle there are no complex melodies that follow a rhythm.

However, there are domestic animals such as dogs, cats, sheep, and cows, which have been living in environments with music for thousands of years and have never moved their bodies to the beat. We can play music and encourage our pets to move with us, or make video montages, but what scientific evidence seems to indicate at the moment is that dogs do not dance. Hence Fitch’s question.

Also in 2006, another scientist named Aniruddh D. Patel suggested an explanation: in order to dance, vocal learning also needs to have happened. This is the ability to imitate new sounds that we hear in our environment with the vocal tract. Although humans do it very easily, this is a rare trait that has emerged in a few groups of animals, such as songbirds, parrots, and cetaceans. Not even our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, have complex vocal learning.

What led Patel to propose this hypothesis? In a previous experiment, he had proven that humans are much better at moving to the rhythm of an auditory stimulus than a visual stimulus. And other studies had shown that, when we listen to music, motor areas in our brain are activated, even if we are not moving. This suggested that rhythm perception must involve specialized cognitive processing that integrated auditory and motor information.

Among the different evolutionary forces that could have encouraged this integration, vocal learning seemed to Patel to be a good candidate, since it requires listening to a sound and reproducing it with our vocal apparatus. Therefore, his hypothesis predicted that only species that had developed vocal learning would be able to dance to music.

Just a year after Patel put forward his hypothesis, a cockatoo named Snowball became famous all over the world for appearing in a YouTube video dancing to Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust. Through an experiment, Patel and his research team at the San Diego Neuroscience Institute demonstrated that Snowball did indeed synchronize his movements with music. When they altered the tempo of the song, the cockatoo automatically adjusted the rhythm of its movements. Since cockatoos have vocal learning, this finding supported their hypothesis.

But in 2013 the behavior of a sea lion called Ronan challenged Patel’s ideas. Ronan was trained by a team at the University of Santa Cruz in California to synchronize his head movements with a musical rhythm. In the study, the authors concluded that since sea lions do not have very flexible vocal learning, they had refuted Patel’s hypothesis, and that the ability shown by Ronan may be more widespread in the animal world.

This discovery opened a debate. Is Ronan really proof that vocal learning and dancing are unrelated? Patel says no. Ronan was subjected to very intensive training when he was still very young. It is unlikely that he would have been able to do it as an adult without prior training. Furthermore, sea lions, although they may not reach the level of parrots or humans, do have vocal learning, but to what extent is, in fact, still unknown.

One aspect that has led Patel to revise his hypothesis is that there are animals like songbirds that, despite having vocal learning, do not seem to be able to dance. In a review published in 2021, he proposes that perhaps only those species with a higher degree of vocal learning can do so. This is not a characteristic that animals have or do not have, but rather a trait that is expressed to a greater or lesser extent. For example, chimpanzees are considered to have some vocal learning, although it is very limited, because they are capable of slightly modifying their innate vocalizations. At the other extreme are humans and parrots (the group to which cockatoos belong), who show great vocal plasticity.

It is possible that only we and parrots have brain connections between the motor and auditory areas that are strong enough to be able to dance. Vocal learning could be a preadaptation meaning that it is an evolutionary change that occurs to fulfill a specific function, but which also ends up enabling a different one, such as dancing. A classic example of preadaptation is bird feathers, which appeared in dinosaurs, and had a thermoregulatory function long before they were used for flight.

If science continues to advance and Patel is definitively proven right, we will know why dogs can’t keep up with a song. Of course, it seems incredible that to carry out an activity as seemingly simple as dancing, animals must first learn to speak.

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