Why Hearing Exams Have been the missing tool until now.

Historical factors that reinforced each other.

Veterinary medicine began with livestock. The first veterinary schools, starting in Lyon in 1761, were founded to protect horses and farm animals. The curriculum was built around disease, survival and productivity. Hearing had no economic value in a cow or a cavalry horse, so it never became a teaching priority. Companion animal medicine became the center of the profession much later, and it inherited that curriculum.

The ear has been taught as skin, not as a sense. Otitis is one of the most common reasons dogs and cats come in. So the ear is taught mostly under dermatology and infection. Veterinarians learn the anatomy and pathology of the ear in depth, but not hearing as a function.

Animals can’t tell you what they hear. Human hearing tests rely on the patient raising a hand or saying “yes.” Without that, hearing could only be measured in research labs with trained animals, or with electrophysiology. That is why BAER, adapted from human medicine, became the only accepted method. Because BAER was used mainly to identify congenital deafness in at-risk breeds like Dalmatians, hearing came to be seen as a breed and genetics question for specialists, not a wellness question for every patient.

Medicine screens for what it can act on. Pets don’t wear hearing aids, so for a long time hearing loss was treated as something to notice, not something to manage. If nothing could be done, there was little reason to look. Gradual loss in older pets was simply accepted as normal aging.

Human medicine had a driver that veterinary medicine never had. In human care, audiology grew into its own profession after World War II, driven by veterans’ hearing loss. Universal newborn hearing screening followed in the 1990s and 2000s. Veterinary medicine had no equivalent event and no audiology specialty to push hearing forward.

All of this created a closed loop. With no practical tool, hearing wasn’t taught. Because it wasn’t taught, it wasn’t in exam protocols. Because it wasn’t in exam protocols, no one was asking for a tool. The Pet Acoustics hearing screening breaks that loop at its starting point. Now that hearing can be screened and something can be done about the result, through sound therapy and guidance for pet parents, the original reasons for leaving it out no longer hold.