Can dogs hear sounds four times farther than humans?

Dogs cannot hear all sounds that are four times farther away than humans. Compared to humans, dogs can probably hear some sounds that are even farther away. But there are some sounds that humans and dogs can hear at about the same distance, and some sounds that humans can hear at farther distances than dogs. We know this because the hearing sensitivity of humans and dogs has been measured in controlled tests. The data, categorized by frequency and sound intensity, is recorded on a chart called an audiogram. We can use the audiogram to compare the hearing abilities of humans and dogs.

“How far away can you hear?” is not a valid standard for measuring or comparing hearing.

So where did this common claim about four times the distance come from? Open any general article on dog hearing and you will find:. This was presented to support the idea that dogs’ hearing is far superior to that of humans, and in many ways that is true, but in my experience there is simply no reference material to back up that particular claim.

You can’t make a general rule comparing dog and human hearing, and there’s another problem: decibels are a logarithmic scale, not linear. So if a sound is four times farther away, it’s not going to be only one-fourth as loud. This counterintuitive relationship between distance and amplitude doesn’t prove the truth of the claim in any way. But it certainly takes some of the “wow” factor away. It doesn’t have the same impact if someone said, “Dogs can hear sounds 12 decibels lower than humans!” That means a four-fold increase in distance results in a decrease in decibels. To test the “four times the distance” claim, we compare dog and human hearing test results to see if there is a difference of 12 decibels or more at some frequencies.

Tracking claims

When I am trying to find evidence for any claim, the first three tools I use are a date-specific internet search, a journal article search, and a book search.

After researching this question on the internet and in journals, I was able to trace the claim back to 2008. Articles about pet dogsFor example, there are many more since then; there may be older examples online; I stopped looking because I found a treasure while searching for a book. But all of the examples of this claim I saw online had one thing in common: they had absolutely no references to back up the claim.

It was a book by Stanley Coren. How dogs think That led me to the source, who writes:

We often hear that dogs’ hearing is four times sharper than humans’, but this is not strictly true. This statement comes from an informal experiment conducted by PWB Joscelyn studying gray wolf activity in Algonquin Park.

Coren, 2004, p. 37

Jocelyn’s article was easy to find; it’s an interesting and highly cited article. A study of wolf howling(The PDF can be downloaded from the URL.) Relevant citations include:

Wolf howls can usually be heard from over a mile away, and on rare occasions from up to 4 miles away… For example, at 4 miles away, the howls of an entire pack of wolves kept at a wildlife research station were barely audible to me and my assistant, but the wolves responded to my howls, although the intensity of my howls was clearly weak.

Joslin, 1967, p. 288

Really, dog world? At another time? This statement is about wolves, not dogs. And it doesn’t say “four times the distance”! It says that he and his colleagues could barely hear the wolf’s howl from four miles away, but the wolf could hear his quieter howl back at the same distance. This is an interesting early observation about wolves and their hearing. It says nothing about the comparative hearing abilities of dogs and humans. This is just another thing that rolled into the dog canon and became established.

Hearing tests

There is data comparing the hearing abilities of dogs and humans. Here is a comparison of their actual hearing:

There are at least three ways to test a dog’s hearing.

1. Operant conditioning, where dogs are taught to perform a behavior when they hear a tone (Guérineau et al, 2024). This is similar to pure-tone testing, where a human wears headphones and signals each time a tone is heard.
2. Response conditioning. Dogs learn that a particular sound predicts food and begin salivating when they hear that sound. Pitch discrimination has been taught this way (Dworkin, 1935).
3. Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR) or Brainstem Auditory Evoked Response (BAER) testing, a non-invasive test in which electrodes are attached to the dog’s head and sounds are played to measure brain activity in response to sound (Scheifele & Clark, 2012).

It’s important to note that moving around and gauging how far away your dog can hear a sound from the source is not one of these methods.

Hearing is tested at a range of frequencies and amplitudes, as the hearing sensitivity of any species varies depending on these two factors. Using one of the tests above (#1 or #3 for humans), the results of the responses are compiled into a graph called an audiogram.

I created a fake hearing chart based on real data. I don’t own the rights to the real hearing chart images or data charts, so I created a graph with a roughly accurate plot. If you want to see the real thing, check out this hearing chart comparing the hearing of five dogs. Good article on animal hearing.

Here’s my fake one, so you can see a rough comparison between human and dog hearing.

In the hearing test, Yeah The axis represents the tiniest decibel level an individual can hear, and therefore indicates more sensitive hearing, so the audiogram appears upside down to us: the most sensitive hearing is at the bottom of the “bowl,” and both species have poor hearing at the edge of the human range.

At the low frequencies on the left side of the graph, from 60 Hz to about 200 Hz, we see that human hearing is more sensitive. At the high frequencies on the right, starting at about 8 kHz, we see that dog hearing is much more sensitive than humans. Comparing the values ​​at 20K, there is a difference of over 60 dB. In that range, a dog can potentially hear something at over 100 times the distance as a human (in the same conditions). By the way, the distance doesn’t have to be something gigantic in miles. It can be in feet or meters.

There’s another oddity about my incomplete graph: it’s not linear, nor does it follow the modern convention of a logarithmic scale. But the numbers on the graph X The axis is not evenly spaced. This is important because the last four values ​​cover a much wider range than the first four. For example, 8,000 to 30,000 covers the same horizontal distance on the graph as 6 to 250. Therefore, the graph does not do a good job of visualizing how wide the frequency range is where a dog’s hearing is more sensitive. A linear graph that continues the same horizontal intervals of 40 Hz between the first two values ​​would extend for over 60 feet, over which distance a dog’s hearing is more sensitive than a human’s.

Why “how far away can you hear?” is not a good indicator of hearing ability

How far sound travels depends on at least four variables:

1. The amplitude of the sound (how loud it is)
2. Frequency of sound (how high or low a sound is)
3. Weather (rainy or dry, what is the temperature, is there wind?)
4. The environment between the sound and the listener (are there barriers between the sound source and the listener that absorb or block certain frequencies? Are there competing sounds?)

This means that if you try to make a comparison over long distances, you can’t make an accurate comparison because the third and fourth variables are constantly changing.

Now you know one reason why humans wear headphones during hearing tests and dogs are tested in small rooms.

If you’re interested in how and why sound decays as it travels, This video About the inverse square law. Here’s a great explanation.

Is this issue important?

Unlike many of the “internet myths” I write about, I don’t think this one is all that important. Dogs certainly have excellent hearing at high frequencies, and while the statement about the four times distance may be true, it doesn’t harm dogs in the obvious way that many of the myths make it out to be.

But that it will be true sometimes is not the issue: what matters is that it will be true whether we say “twice the distance” or “nine times the distance” or even “half the distance”. sometimesThat’s pointless. It doesn’t give us the information we need to know. And that information is available. Hence this post.

Copyright 2024 Eileen Anderson

Related article

credit

• Photo of Clara howling and Zani tilting her head. Copyright 2017 Eileen Anderson.
• Poster “Really, Dog World?” Copyright 2024 Eileen Anderson, However, Kate knows dogsI’m sure there’s a better version you can make.
• Image of fake hearing test results, copyright 2024 Eileen Anderson. Again, this is an average of multiple data sets, an approximation, not the result of an actual experiment.
• Image of what Lewis sees and hears, copyright 2022 Eileen Anderson.

References

• Barber, A. L., Wilkinson, A., Ratcliffe, V. F., Guo, K., & Mills, D. S. (2020). A comparison of dog and human hearing and auditory function. Comparative cognitive behavioral review, 15.
• Coren, S. (2004). How Dogs Think: Understanding the Mind of a DogFree Press.
• Dworkin, S. (1935). Digestive motor conditioning and tone discrimination in dogs. American Journal of Physiology – Legacy Content, 112(2), pp. 323-328.
• Guérineau, C., Broseghini, A., Lõoke, M., Dehesh, G., Mongillo, P., & Marinelli, L. (2024). Measuring hearing thresholds in dogs using the staircase method. Veterinary Medicine, 11(2) Page 67.
• Scheifele, PM, & Clark, JG (2012). Electrodiagnostic assessment of hearing function in dogs. North American Veterinary Clinic: Small Animal Care, 42(6), 1241-1257.