Exploring the Relationship between Music and Dog Behavior
Music. It’s been known to soothe the savage beast and provide a soundtrack to our fondest memories. Everyone has their own taste in music and our fur babies are no exception. Music can have a profound effect on the mood and behavior of all sorts of animals including dogs. Researchers have conducted various studies exploring the effect of music, especially classical music, on dogs and have found that music has a calming effect on many dogs. This blog post will explore how music, and to a lesser extent sound in general, can affect your dog’s mood and behavior.
Bark and Bach
Researchers have conducted experiments to explore the effect of classical music on dogs and have found that classical music typically has a calming effect on dogs. Dogs’ stress levels were shown to decrease significantly when exposed to classical music. These stress levels were determined based on heart rate, saliva samples and observation of behavior. These effects only last for a short period, as the effects were not as pronounced with repeated exposure. This just goes to show that dogs seem to appreciate listening to a variety of music just like humans. Classical music can be a wonderful tool to help your dog relax if they are anxious or overstimulated.
Other Calming Music for Dogs
Besides classical music, a few other genres of music have been proven to help encourage relaxation and calm behavior. Reggae and soft rock have been shown to have a relaxing effect on dogs comparable to that of classical music. Using a variety of music over time to reduce stress over time yields the best results when using music to relax your fur baby. After about a week of exposure to the same kind of music, dogs get used to the background noise and their stress levels begin to rise. It’s best to create multiple playlists with a variety of calming music (soft rock, reggae, classical, etc…) or multiple playlists that you can alternate and play when your pup could use an extra dose of calm in their life.
Spotify is for the Dogs
Spotify conducted and an international study recently to determine what percentage of pet owners from Europe and the United States played music for their pets. The study revealed that around 71% of pet owners play music for their pets and that about 8 in 10 pet owners believe that their pets like music. They also found that, as we previously stated in this post, pets seem to prefer soft rock and classical music. To get a specially curated playlist for your fur baby, head over to spotify.com/pets. You will need a Spotify account to use the curated pet playlist service, but you don’t need
a premium account. The first thing to do when beginning the playlist process for pup is to choose dog as your pet. Afterward, you will be prompted to enter in some basic information about your dog as if they are energetic vs. relaxed and shy vs. friendly and then a specially curated playlist will be available for your pup. You can even share the playlist with others and add a photo of your fur baby.
Music helps to make everything better and that applies to your pup’s moments of relaxation as well. Sharing music with your pup is a wonderful experience and we highly recommend that you play around with the Spotify playlist feature and see how your pup likes the resulting playlist. Did you make a playlist for your pup? Share it with us on social media!
ElliotsHouse
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