Love in the Shape of a Dog

What does music have to do with dogs or dogs with music? Add humans to this mix, and my answer is: oh, so much.

I’ve been absent from blogging for the past while because our beloved canine Cody was going through treatment for lymphoma. Yes, there is doggie chemo, and I am so grateful.

Cody, a kelpie-blue heeler mix, is the smartest dog I’ve ever known. She is a herder (we don’t actually have sheep in our back yard, so we enrolled her in a class called Urban Herding in which dogs learn to herd exercise balls. She quickly became expert at this unlikely task.) Cody is also a soccer player and a swimmer and a dog who leaps onto tall things on mountain hikes.

Cody learned to sing from her older sibling (not really a sib), Belle, a husky. Belle howled at sirens and patiently taught Cody to howl along. “Awoooooo! Awwoooooooooooh!” The middle howl would be the apex of a crescendo, and then the howls would gradually get softer and come to a close. Really, like any good piece of music.

We were very surprised to learn that Cody is a soprano. You couldn’t tell this by looking at her, but she sings the way an 8-pound yappy dog might while accompanying sirens.

Why do dogs howl? It is thought that since dogs evolved from wolves, the howling might be a way to communicate with the pack. They’re responding in some way to the siren as another big wolf maybe, or they might be letting their packmates know that there’s something out there and they’d better howl back to communicate that they got the message. Watching and listening to their howling duet was, to me, like hearing a completely new and wonderful genre of music. It was peaceful, expressive. Musical! Like they really were singing. Belle passed on four years ago and Cody has since stopped howling. I miss their dog songs.

Do dogs love music? Do they know that they make music? I don’t know for sure, who does? There are studies about pitch perception in dogs – they can’t perceive intervals like we can. (Why in the world would they even test for this?) But their hearing is astronomically better than ours. The average human adult hears in the range of 15-17,000 Hz (which is a measure of frequency/cycles per second). Dogs can hear up to 65,000Hz, over three times what we can hear. Hertz (Hz) is a measure of pitch, not loudness. If you know a dog, you know that they react to volume in addition to pitch. Dog whistles? Yes, they really do work, if you use them the right way. We blow and hear a whisper. A dog will hear a high pitched whistle, higher than anything we can imagine.

And of all the musical genres out there, supposedly dogs love reggae the most. (Here’s an old-but-good article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/nov/02/pet-sounds-why-your-dog-loves-listening-to-bob-marley) It makes sense – why wouldn’t music be soothing to dogs? Why reggae in particular? It’s been shown that reggae reduces stress (and barking and general dog anxiety) better than classical and other genres. There are playlists on Spotify, there are websites (icalmpet.com) or entire channels on youtube (search “reggae music for dogs”). A neighbor shared with me that there such a thing as dog TV. An entire channel on Dish TV. And there are other channels on youtube. It’s amazing.

And of course there’s music about dogs. I’ll leave you, for the moment, with this:

We will do anything for them, (especially doggie chemo), because we love them and they are love - shaped like dogs.