by Diane Garrod

Created on: June 22, 2009   Last Updated: August 07, 2009

One word describes a healthy dog's hearing - sensitive. A dog can sense sounds at four times the distance of a human. If you understand how your dog hears, you'll be able to communicate better because you'll see how they perceive the world. Dog's depend on their acute sense of hearing to survive, to hunt, to protect, to detect and to perform.

HEARING FACTS

Compared to humans, who can hear frequencies between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz, dogs can hear sounds between 67 Hz and 45,000 to 60,000 Hz, depending on breed. This means healthy dogs can hear higher frequencies than humans. Dogs can hear the heartbeat of a rabbit or the peep of a mouse. Like a satellite dish a dog's ears rotate to capture sound and pick up high frequencies.

Dogs have 18 muscles in their ears allowing them to quickly respond to sound by rotating their ear in different directions. In comparison, the human ear has nine muscles. Specially designed inner ear allows radar-like operation and movement.

In addition to multiple ways to move their ears, dogs additionally will tilt their heads in the direction of the sound to capture vibrations.

Dogs can perceive height and depth of the sounds. They have the ability to hear ultra high frequencies undetectable by the human ear and distinguish between different footstep sounds, car sounds or animal sounds.

HOW LOUD IS LOUD TO A DOG

Dogs easily hear everything the human ear can pick up except four times louder. They detect fainter sounds from greater distances, and on much higher frequencies. They are able to determine the direction a sound is coming more accurately than a human.and can differentiate between similar sounds such as the footsteps made by their owner, the postman, the neighbor or friend. and they can clearly differentiate pitch, voice tone, and word pronunciations.

What sounds loud to the human ear becomes four times louder to a dog. Higher than normal frequencies will cause Fido to bark at, attack or even run to hide. As an example, turn the volume up on the television or radio to four times what you normally listen to and you'll have an idea of a dog's audio sensitivities. Psychologically a diet of continued loud sounds such as screaming children, rock music, increased television volume or similar can cause a dog to have behavior problems due to noise stress.

COMMUNICATING TO YOUR DOG THROUGH USE OF SOUND

Silent Whistles.

These are whistles made for dogs that sound silent to humans. The pitch of the frequency is higher than the human's

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