What 10,615 Pet Hearing Tests Revealed — And Why It Changes Everything
*By Janet Marlow, M.A., Certified Sound Behaviorist | Founder and CEO, Pet Acoustics*
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When we released the Pet Acoustics+ hearing screening, we expected pet parents to use it out of curiosity. What we did not expect was what the data would show us.
Over four years, between 2022 and 2026, the Pet Acoustics+ behavioral hearing screening was completed 10,615 times — by dog and cat owners in 86 countries, across every age group, every breed type, and every kind of household. It is, to our knowledge, the largest observational behavioral hearing dataset ever compiled for companion animals.
What we found stopped us in our tracks.
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Nearly Half of All Pets Showed Hearing Impairment
Of the 10,615 screenings completed, **46.5% of pets showed some degree of hearing impairment** in at least one frequency band. More than a quarter — 28.2% — showed significant loss across all three frequency bands tested.
We did not anticipate this prevalence. Hearing loss in companion animals is almost never discussed at a routine wellness visit. There is no standard screening. No baseline is ever established. Most pet owners have no idea their animal's hearing has changed — because the signs are so easy to misread.
A dog that stops coming when called. A cat that startles when you approach. A pet that seems to have become stubborn, anxious, or disconnected. These are not personality changes. In a significant proportion of cases, they are hearing changes — and they are going undetected.
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The Frequency Picture
The Pet Acoustics+ screening tests behavioral response across three frequency bands:
- **Low frequency** (125 Hz to 1 kHz): 82.1% clear response
- **Mid frequency** (1 kHz to 4 kHz): 76.4% clear response
- **High frequency** (4 kHz to 16+ kHz): only **49.8% clear response**
High-frequency hearing is the first to go. It is the most sensitive marker of age-related sensorineural decline — and it is the range that pets rely on most heavily for environmental awareness, communication, and behavioral cues. When high-frequency response is absent, a pet's experience of the world is fundamentally different from what their owner assumes.
More than half of all pets screened had lost meaningful response in the high-frequency range. Most of their owners had no idea.
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Age Matters — But Perhaps Not in the Way You Think
The age-related pattern in our data is clear and follows what we would expect from sensorineural decline:
- **Ages 0–3:** 40.5% showing some hearing impairment
- **Ages 3–7:** 27.5% impairment
- **Ages 7–12:** 31.5% impairment
- **Ages 12+:** 53.6% impairment
The senior and geriatric numbers are not surprising. What is striking is the 0–3 figure. **40.5% of young pets showed hearing impairment.** This is not age-related decline — it points toward congenital factors, breed predispositions, and early environmental exposures that we do not yet fully understand.
It also means that hearing loss is not something to watch for when a pet gets older. A baseline established at the first wellness visit could reveal impairment that has been present since birth — and that may be silently shaping that animal's behavior every single day.
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Dogs and Cats — More Similar Than You Might Expect
**Dogs:** 47.4% showed some hearing impairment
**Cats:** 42.3% showed some hearing impairment
The rates are comparable across species. Hearing loss is not a dog issue or a cat issue — it is a companion animal issue, and it affects both with roughly equal frequency.
For cats specifically, 53.6% of those aged 12 and older showed hearing impairment. Given that cats already visit the vet far less frequently than dogs, and that feline hearing loss is even harder for owners to detect, this finding has significant implications for how we approach feline wellness care.
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The Clinical Gap
We also surveyed the 318 veterinary clinics that participated in our free screening program. The result was sobering: **79% had no hearing assessment protocol in place.**
Hearing is the only primary sense not routinely evaluated at a wellness visit. We check eyes. We check teeth. We listen to hearts and lungs. We assess gait and body condition. But we do not check hearing — and yet nearly half of all companion animals appear to have some degree of impairment.
That gap is not a failure of veterinary care. It is a gap that has persisted because no scalable, practical, affordable screening tool existed. Until now.
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What This Means for Your Pet
If you have never screened your pet's hearing, now is the time. Not because something is necessarily wrong — but because you cannot know without a baseline.
The Pet Acoustics+ hearing screening takes under two minutes. It runs on any smartphone. It is completely free. It tests your pet's behavioral response to species-specific sounds across three frequency bands, and your results arrive as a clinical PDF you can share with your veterinarian.
Here is what a baseline tells you:
- Whether your pet's hearing is currently intact — a meaningful reassurance
- What your pet's hearing profile looks like at this point in their life
- A comparison point for every future screening, so you can track change over time rather than guessing
Hearing loss in companion animals is not painful. Pets with hearing impairment adapt, often remarkably well. But they adapt better — and live more comfortably — when the people who love them know what they are experiencing.
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The Bigger Picture
10,615 screenings across 86 countries. Four years of data. A finding that nearly half of companion animals may be navigating a world they can no longer hear clearly — without anyone knowing.
We built this tool because we believed hearing health in companion animals was underappreciated. The data has proven us right in ways we did not anticipate.
Hearing is not just about sound. It is a primary sensory pathway into behavior, emotion, stress, and wellbeing. When it changes — especially when it changes slowly and silently, as it so often does — the effects ripple into everything: how a pet relates to its home, to other animals, to its family, and to the veterinarians trying to keep it healthy.
This dataset is the beginning of something important. We are sharing it because we believe the veterinary community, the research community, and every pet owner deserves to know what we have found.
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Try the Free Hearing Screening
Download Pet Acoustics+ free on iOS and Android. The hearing screening is free, takes under two minutes, and requires nothing more than your smartphone.
**petacoustics.com/app**
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*Janet Marlow, M.A., is a Certified Sound Behaviorist, founder and CEO of Pet Acoustics Inc., and the developer of the world's first behavioral digital hearing screening for companion animals. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed international journals and is endorsed by the Fear Free veterinary initiative. She can be reached at janetmarlow@petacoustics.com.*
