The Whimper of Saudade

What you hear at night

Why do dogs living in rural outdoor enclosures, often with only one or two humans around them, take guarding so seriously? And why do they sometimes bark in patterns where the bark spills over into small whimpers — could that carry a specific meaning in the world of canine communication?

These are questions I have found myself asking naturally here in the countryside of southern Portugal. Because when I lie peacefully in my tent at night on a double mattress, I can hear them barking to one another at certain moments: from perhaps 200 metres away to maybe two kilometres out, where they guard their owner's house and the large stretch of land around it. They often live completely outdoors, including at night.

These dogs do bark over one another, but they also seem to answer one another's barking — which I quickly began, with a little imagination, to hear as a dialogue: “How was your day, brother?”

And then that other dog two kilometres away barking back: “Yeah, that bitch came by again with that dickhead of a man. These aren't really friends, are they? But alright, I still got petted a few times — how is it over there?”

Call that interpretation poetic, but it is closer to the truth than it sounds. What you hear at night is apparently a real phenomenon — researchers call it relay barking. It starts with one dog noticing something, then the next responds, then the next: a wave spreading across the landscape. They are performing an ongoing territorial check-in. They confirm to one another that they are there, that their patch is intact, that everything is as it should be. Dogs that live outdoors in the countryside take guarding so seriously because their territorial instinct is fully activated — a concrete, bounded area that is theirs and must be defended. During the day there is competing noise. At night the soundscape is empty, sounds travel farther, and vigilance peaks anyway. They recognise each other's individual voices and know the difference between a routine signal and something that really requires alarm.

The whimper

And then there is that whimpering — which also returns when they miss something or someone, and which, put very dryly, they feel excitement about. Then that little whimper comes back. It is the sound of unfulfilled expectation: the dog has someone in its sensory memory — a smell, a sound, a silhouette — and reality does not match what it wants. That field of tension between longing and absence produces exactly that sound.

What is striking is that it does not seem to come out in a controlled way. It escapes more, the way humans can sigh or let out a small groan without planning to. In rural guard dogs it appears at those crossroads: they smell the owner on the wind, or hear a familiar dog in the distance — but it is too far away, too vague, too unreachable.

Dogs produce oxytocin in social bonding just like humans do, and its absence creates measurable discomfort. Put dryly: excitement about something that is not there. But that may be the most universal emotional experience there is.

O pequeno gemido da Saudade

In Portuguese, among both Portuguese and Brazilians, that feeling is called saudade, which in English is best approximated as longing or homesickness, though the word is often described as untranslatable because of its layering: the desire for something that once was, or that you expected, but is now absent, with both pain and warmth contained in that absence.

The outdoor dog gives it a universal sound through those bark-whimpers in the dead of night: O pequeno gemido da Saudade. The whimper of Saudade.

— T.S. (25/04), 7:47