It was not until about 1940 that the dog whistle, a tool for signaling and training hunting dogs, and Galton’s ultrasonic whistle — mainstay of the psychology lab — were combined into a single technology. The first patent was filed for a dog whistle “of [sufficiently] high frequency so that it may be heard by a dog but not heard by the human ear.”
The “silent” dog whistle changed which kinds of dogs were being whistle-trained. No longer were whistles primarily a tool for hunting over long distances. They were for suburban dogs — an increasingly salient feature of the racially segregated and suburbanizing American landscape. As ads for Purina whistles promised, these couldn’t disturb your neighbors.
Silent dog whistles also became a tool for training police dogs. Though connections between dogs and policing in America go back to the days of slave catchers, the role of dogs in modern policing gained wider use in the 1950s. According to one 1961 study, “the public has fully accepted the canine corps. There were only three complaints reported, one not described and the other two stemming from the feeling among Negroes that dogs are used in their areas disproportionately to the need for them.” The overpolicing of Black neighborhoods — including with dogs — was rooted in ideas about criminality, race and intelligence and morals that go straight back to Galton and the psychologists he influenced.
The introduction of dogs to modern policing took hold just in time for the animals to feature in iconic and violent images of the struggle for civil rights, including police dogs attacking peaceful Black protesters in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. President Trump evoked this scene earlier this year when he threatened Black Lives Matter protesters with “vicious dogs,” a comment that only avoided the “racist dog whistle” label because its motives seemed obvious.
It was in this context that the silent dog whistle, an invention that unified racist scientific equipment with racist cultures of dog hunting, became a technology that facilitated violent opposition to civil rights.
But even during the Civil Rights era, this fraught tool had yet to become a metaphor for a broader category of secret signals or exclusionary communication. In a 2008 book, William Safire claimed that the metaphorical use of dog whistle began 20 years prior in a column by then-Washington Post polling director Richard Morin, who asserted that “dog whistle effect” was a term of art among public opinion researchers. Morin’s column was written just weeks after the broadcast of the infamous Willie Horton campaign ad, perhaps the clearest example of a racist dog whistle in American politics before Trump.
Yet the metaphor really only became common parlance in Barack Obama’s second term, and has skyrocketed since the 2016 election.
When a technology becomes a metaphor, we recycle knowledge about how it works and what effects it has on us to articulate another part of our lives. Our needs and desires, how something is sold to us and what it says about us when we use technology all help give the metaphor meaning.