Wild dogs howl and house dogs bark

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bobze said:
Its also important to remember that because something is in the scientific literature it isn't "laid in stone" or the "grail". Lots and lots of crappy papers get published and pass-peer review (even in journals like Science and Nature--Remember that whole arsenic thing?). Simply knowing something is published literature doesn't inform one on the topic. One has to take it a step further and use that scientific training of theirs to discriminate whether said publication is saying something significant or not. That is something most laymen are not capable of doing. Which is why for a non-scientist a general link to something like Wikipedia is great. :smile:
This is a very important point, the number of papers that I see that are just flat out poor yet published (sometimes in respectable journals) is worrying. It behooves everyone to remember that peer-review is the absolute minimum for credibility, nothing more. The validity of a study should be based on it's methodology and the conclusions drawn from the data, this is a bigger discussion of course but it is very important to keep in mind.

We don't want to perpetuate the idea that published = credible or correct.
 
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Anna Blanksch said:
Why do we hear coyotes and wolves howl or yelp while house dogs more often bark? Does it have something to do with living in a pack vs. living alone?

Also... today when I was on a walk around noon I spotted two separate coyotes (the dog I was walking started barking at the first one which got me thinking about my previous question). I thought wild dogs were nocturnal. Is that incorrect? If it is correct, could their day-time roaming have something to do with the noisy humans keeping them up?

Thanks!

Coyotes are rather flexible with regards to their daily schedule. When I was jogging in New Mexico desert about noon, I would stop and see a coyote looking at me. A few coyotes have recently appeared in Maryland, where I now live. While I never saw any of them directly, I was told that they like twilight and night. They scavenge the garbage. So here, they like the hours before the garbage pick up.