How Animals Hear

How We Hear

Imagine that you are standing in the center of a field out in nature. The sounds common to this experience have an aural perspective, meaning that we hear in a 360-degree circle- the height and depth of all the sounds. For instance, one can hear the rustling of leaves in the trees, a breeze rushing past our ears, birds chirping nearby and in the distance, airplanes overhead, or cars on a nearby road; we can also hear the contrasting quiet of stillness. We can identify these sounds as they occur, “I understand that is a bird, that is the wind in the trees, that is a car approaching, and that is a plane.” Our reactions to these sounds are appropriate to how we identify the sound source in the aural perspective of our environment.

How They Hear

Dogs, cats and horses hear frequency ranges that are both much higher and much lower than what humans are capable of hearing. In addition to their acute hearing, the important difference between their hearing capacity and ours is that an animal does not have the same spatial localization as a human, even though their hearing is more acute. In other words, they react to the sound source without analyzing what it is but react to frequency and volume by a flight or fight response.

As our pets live in non-nature environments for the most part, these instinctive reactions to extreme sounds can often manifest themselves as behavioral responses such as stress, anxiety or aggression.

Animals listen to sounds and music quite differently than humans. Your pet does not have the same audio/spatial localization ability that you have. If there are jarring sounds or shots at loud unexpected volumes, a dog, cat or horse will hear the sound at a greater intensity than humans and instinctively go into fight or flight mode. Amazingly, dogs can react to a sound at .06 of a second.

For our pets, responses to low frequencies such as loud drums from a sound system can easily generate stress as it may mean, "Get ready to flee." For dogs and cats, very low or very high frequency information and resonant vibrations are sounds that are indistinguishable from a loud vehicle or thunder. This uncertainty combined with the fact that they cannot locate the source of these vibrations causes them to react with their alert instincts which results in stressed behavior.

The human equivalent of a pet’s auditory experience of sound in a home, kennel or barn is what is called ‘non-human psychoacoustic juxtaposition.’ This means that how they experience sound juxtaposes a human’s experience of sound. That is why music as a therapeutic tool cannot just be human music but designed for the specifics of the animals hearing range.