Is normal TV volume too loud for dogs?

The full narration of the video.

It's evening: you're on the sofa watching TV, your dog at your feet. Everyone says a dog's ears are far sharper than ours. So the volume that feels just right to you: does it sound to your dog like someone shouting in its ear? Lots of people picture it like this: a dog's ear has an amplifier inside, and every sound that goes in comes out several times louder.

That picture is only a little bit right. A dog's sharp hearing is really two different things. First: hearing quieter sounds. Scientists played dogs a tiny sound and kept turning it down, to find where the dog stopped noticing it. With higher-pitched sounds, dogs really can catch quieter ones than we can. But in the range of human voices and TV dialogue, dogs and people are about the same.

And hearing quieter sounds doesn't mean loud sounds feel louder. Picture two people in a library. One can hear a pin drop. The other can't. But stand them both next to a big drum, and that boom is just as deafening for each. Second: hearing higher sounds. How high a sound is depends on how many times the air shakes each second. People top out around twenty thousand times a second. Dogs go up to forty-five thousand.

But TV sound is recorded for human ears. The part above what people can hear is mostly left out when it's recorded, and the speakers couldn't play it anyway. So the extra stretch of a dog's hearing mostly sits idle in front of the TV. So: the volume that sounds normal to you is probably about normal for your dog too. Scientists can't ask a dog how loud it feels. This is worked out from testing their ears.

Still, two things are worth watching. One: sudden bangs. Lots of dogs are scared of fireworks, and an explosion in a movie can make them jump too. Two: noise that never stops. Researchers measured kennels at around a hundred decibels all day, louder than a motorcycle engine. After six months there, over half the dogs had clearly lost hearing. So when the TV's on, leave it a way out to another room. If it walks off on its own, it's telling you it doesn't like it.

One last surprise: there really was a kind of TV that could bother dogs. Old, bulky tube TVs, while they were on, had a part inside that gave off a constant high-pitched whine. It shook over fifteen thousand times a second. Lots of adults couldn't hear it anymore. Kids often could, and dogs most likely could too. When you were a kid, did you ever hear that old TV whine?