Improve Your Understanding of Your Dog by Getting to Understand How They Hear

A dog's keen sensitivity to low-volume sound is often troublesome. They can hear a faint sound at 75 feet, while most humans could only detect it at 17 feet. This indicates that a dog must learn to ignore myriad sounds that do not affect him, and accommodate to a veritable avalanche of sounds in a family household, such as television, radio, stereos, etc.

When it comes to our relationship with our dogs, this IS a big deal!

Think about it, the dog does not hear like you and I. He has an acute ability to hear certain things far better than us and other times, he'll literally tune out.

When this sensitivity is translated to phobic behaviour relative to, say, thunderstorms, it indicates that dogs may hear the thunder of an approaching storm over 50 miles away, while the sky is still clear. If a dog has a history of becoming upset by thunder or other explosive sounds, he may become increasingly anxious as the storm nears, salivating, pacing, hiding, seeking comfort if the owner is home, or escaping.

This sensitivity may also cast some doubt on some of the commercially marketed "desensitising" techniques, such as playing recordings of thunder at low levels. Audio speakers are not designed to produce volumes softer than humans can perceive - in other words, if we hear them the way they're meant to sound, then they sound VERY different to the dog because his hearing is not 'wired up' the same as our own.

In the case of storms, they are generally preceded by elements to which dogs and some other mammals appear to be sensitive. Merely producing low-volume thunder claps may not fulfill the total stimulus complex required to achieve desensitisation. This is important to remember if we're dealing with a noise sensitive dog - it really isn't as simple as sticking on a CD and hoping they 'get used to it'. The CD sounds very, very different.

An important auditory/learning tendency in dogs is to quickly develop a motor movement response to a sound stimulus when the sound is accompanied by a visual signal. In other words, dogs tend to move their head, ears, eyes or other body part in response to sound accompanied by movement.

So it's important to remember that a dog will very quickly lock on to carrying out a certain behaviour in response to a particular sound - whether we've inadvertently trained this behaviour ourselves or not, the dog will respond based on what HE's learned.

A fun game to play is to create a number of different sounds and see which ones cause the most positive reaction in the dog - it gives an owner an excellent insight in to which sounds the dog reacts well to and this is something that can be very well utilised when we're teaching our dogs new things.

Finally, just to reiterate, the way to treat noise phobic dogs is to get a better understanding of the fact that it often isn't just noise that they're actually upset about, it can be a whole number of atmospheric incidents that us mere humans haven't even spotted. Many dog owners treat such problems with pheromone products and by using distraction techniques to occupy a dog on something fun and positive during a storm or other stressfully noisy event.