Just Write Communications
  • Home
  • Contact Us
  • News
  • Clients
  • Testimonials
  • Writing Tips
  • Weekly Chuckle
  • Meals We Steal
  • Bad Golf

Dog Hearing Theory

2/14/2016

0 Comments

 
​Whether you have a dog or not, you’ve probably seen one somewhere barking and you wonder what the heck it is doing. I certainly have.
 
Do dogs bark to say “hello?” Are they territorial and telling the hound next door, “This is my place. Stay off my turf.” Or, when they unleash a staccato of yaps, is it just that they want to share neighborhood information, “Hey, Waldo, there’s a skunk living in the ditch in front of the house on the corner. Check it out. Maybe you’ll get sprayed like I did. Smells great.”
 
We don’t know. It’s all assumptions on our part. Dogs have their own language.
 
Dogs operate in ways we can’t understand. Their senses (sight, smell and hearing) are supposed to be heightened compared to humans. That’s accurate based on the reactions our two dogs – Pepper and Thor – display when the slightest noise is out of the ordinary.
 
We see this in our house, when for absolutely no reason at all (to us deaf humans), both of them jump from the couch and blast their way to the doggie door, on a mission to communicate with their fellow mammal. Within seconds, sure enough, a dog will emerge around the curve on our street, and the barking contest begins.
 
“This is my place. Stay off the turf,” ours howl.
 
“So what. You’re behind the fence and can’t do anything about it,” the dog on the street responds. He then lifts his leg and hoses down our mailbox or drops a couple of loafs on our grass.
 
That’s probably a pretty accurate conversation from the human perspective. What amazes me most in those situations though is, “How the heck did our dogs know the other one was coming up the street?” Ours were sleeping or lounging about, so they didn’t see anything out the window. I can’t imagine they smelled the newcomer since ours where indoors.
 
That leaves the third option, which is that somehow they heard the other mongrel. Can they hear a pin drop a block away? Sometimes I wonder.
 
When we drive our cars up the driveway, the dogs are often there to greet us. It may be that they only happened to be there by coincidence. But, if I am home alone, and my wife’s car comes up the street, the dogs have already heard her vehicle and are sprinting outside to greet her. “How the heck far away can they hear a car?”
 
I’m not sure of that answer, either. So, I decided to test Pepper and Thor’s hearing recently.
 
The TV was on.  The microwave was humming and I was putting some shredded cheese on a plate. “Hmmmm, I wonder if the dogs can hear one sliver of shredded cheese drop into their food dish?” Surely not, the human thinks.
 
I sneak over to their metal food bowls on the floor. Thor is upstairs, Pepper lying down facing away from me. I drop one tiny and thin shredded piece of cheese into the dish. It lands, muffled by the background noise. But it must have “dinged” somehow on the metal, because Pepper IMMEDIATELY rousts herself, and comes over to inhale the human food. Snarf, snarf.  Unbelievable.
 
My wife is sitting in the room, and I explain my dog hearing experiment to her. She shakes her head. She knows all about animals, so she probably isn’t surprised.
 
But I am astounded. Think if we could harness dog hearing for national security. They could eavesdrop on North Korea or the Russians from a neighboring continent. The implications for intelligence gathering are titanic.
 
And if we could figure out what the barking means, we might get somewhere.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013

    Categories

    All

Proudly powered by Weebly