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SOUNDS

At La Guardia airport in New York, I can hear a man drumming on his table in some rhythm that has nothing to do with the loud music on the speakers of the restaurant. A cash register just printed out a receipt with a noisy inkjet printer. A woman scoots her chair and the screeching sound carries across the room. A man laughs. The fan above the stove blows loudly while food crackles on the grill.

High heels clink past me on the tile as a woman runs to her flight. A suitcase being pulled by, sounding just like a skateboard. Ice clinks into a glass just before it crashes to the floor, sending pieces skittering across the floor. A luggage cart drives by and honks three times in a row to get people to move. Loud sports coverage switches to the crowd cheering on the television on the wall above my head, with scenes changing every 3 seconds. A television on the same channel is across the room, creating a strange echo effect. A child drops his fork and starts to cry. There are so many conversations that I can’t pay attention to any individual voices.

You may never take your dog into a busy airport, but everywhere we go, there are sounds. If you live in the city and your puppy is used to the (relatively) quiet countryside, it’s a big change to enter your realm of constant noise. Also note that your dog’s experience of this same situation may be different. The sound is louder or quieter at his height, depending on the source. Cars, for example, are much louder for dogs.

There are lots of sounds that you might expect your puppy to have issues with, but your puppy can also hear at a higher frequency than you can. So if your puppy suddenly “sees ghosts,” his fear may be due to a sound that is just not in a frequency that you can hear. If my dog, Peanut, were in the airport with me right now, he might hear the sound of my computer whirring, along with the sound of hundreds of other electronic devices, including the iPad at every seat. He’d feel the bass of the music vibrating his whiskers.

Your dog also has a different flicker fusion rate, by the way. So where we see a steady stream of light from a fluorescent lamp, he may see a lot of flickering. It’s kind of like trying to see clearly with strobe lights in a nightclub.

In the forest, too, he’d be detecting tiny sounds that I cannot hear at all. These differences help them out when it comes to hunting little animals. But it’s kind of impressive that dogs can function at all in the human-made part of the world.

I mentioned before that controllability is huge for building confidence. So teach your puppy to make these noises himself, as well. Get him to knock a milk carton around with rocks and treats inside – put the rocks in through the top, then close the lid. Put holes in the container that are too small for the rocks but small enough to let the treats out. If your puppy is sensitive to sounds, start with only treats inside and build up to adding rocks, bells, etc. As you add noisier items, make the treats more delicious.

Use a recording of various noises as a marker, so you’d play the noise briefly as a “click” and then feed the dog. Turn it off just before he’s finished getting treats. Play the recording at a low enough volume that the dog is not at all scared, but he can still hear it. Jo Laurens, CBATI followed my recommendation and submitted the video below as homework when she took this course with her puppy. Note that even though the sound seems louder to us at first and then quieter, it is actually the other way around for the dog. The speaker was first turned toward the camera (away from the dog, so quieter for the dog, but louder for us) and then toward the dog (away from the camera – quieter for us).

Sounds can also be introduced at low volume just before activities that your puppy enjoys. That way, he has a little time to process the sound, and then he gets, say, a food puzzle. The sound led to something good and he also continues to hear it as the puzzle goes on. So he is getting used to it as background noise. You can gradually turn up the volume over time if he is completely comfortable. If you are seeing any ear twitching or looking in the direction of the sound, it is too loud.

Introduce sounds multiple times, in a variety of places. This is especially true for the sounds that dogs are generally more afraid of, like thunder. Let your puppy experience each sound at least once without a lot of other sounds, to be sure he heard it and will remember. Also make sure your dog is totally safe when new sounds are introduced. So never play new sounds during puppy play time or nail trimming, for example. If the puppy is frightened or hurt just at the wrong moment, he may associate that with the sound.

The good thing is that your puppy needs three meals a day, so you can play a sound before each one. In case you didn’t notice this before, his meals should come from a puzzle most of the time, not a bowl. Have some sounds recorded on your phone or computer and play them before the meal.

MOVING OBJECTS

In the airport scene described above, Peanut would also be noticing a lot more movement than I would. While the human eye is better at seeing details, dogs are far better at detecting motion. So every person walking or running by, the man jiggling his legs, the woman nervously tapping her thigh, the man putting away his laptop beside me… Peanut would see all of that, and more.

Some dogs are afraid of movement and many dogs chase anything that moves, either to herd or to catch. All of these responses can be a problem. You can teach your dog to look at you whenever he sees something exciting by constantly doing the autowatch activity that I described in the first lesson. That works fine, as a strategy for coping, but your dog then never really has a chance to see what’s going on, because he’s always looking at you.

In this video, Bean is learning about the lawn mower by having a chance to check it out.

So while I do like to teach the dog to check in a lot, my preference is to not take it to extremes. I would rather work on relaxation around moving objects. Like the autowatch, relaxation is incompatible with chasing and fear, since the dog can’t relax his muscles and chase something at the same time. But relaxation gives dogs a chance to process more information and notice that a) there is nothing to fear and b) the moving object leaves eventually anyway. We talked about teaching relaxation through association near the beginning of the course. Say Relax just before doing something relaxing with the puppy or before you see the puppy about to settle.

A way that’s a bit more practical around moving objects is to manufacture relaxation by catching small bits of it. Mark with a calm marker word and feed calmly or use massage if it doesn’t excite your puppy. When that works well, you can start to do the same activity at a good distance away from something that’s moving, like cars, other dogs, etc.

 

PARALLEL PLAY

Parallel play is a term generally used with children, meaning they are doing activities at the same time, nearby but not really doing it together. Each child is doing her own thing, but is still being somewhat social because it’s done near another child. When I use the term with respect to dogs, I basically mean the same thing – while your dog is getting used to another person or dog, occasionally checking in, each of them are doing their own thing, like sniffing for treats or working through food puzzles.

This is similar to what I discussed above in terms of surfaces – while the puppy is sniffing for treats, he’s also walking on a new surface, getting used to both at the same time. In both cases, there may be a pleasant association made, but it’s also not quite the same as really interacting with the other puppy or really noticing the surface. So while I do recommend doing parallel play activities for socialization or using treats in various ways for surfaces, I also make sure that we provide a chance for interaction without the distractions, as well.

Parallel play is an excellent thing to use to get your puppy used to motions, like the vacuum cleaner. You can feed your puppy a food puzzle while you vacuum. If your puppy becomes interested in the vacuum cleaner, just make it “boring” and wait for him to inspect it and go back to his puzzle.

As another example, when your puppy is outside and the neighbors are also out with their children or other dogs, you can scatter treats in your backyard or give your puppy a Kong. That gives him a chance to get used to the various sounds and motions. He may look up for a bit, and then go back to his task.

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