Relaxing your pets with music, audiobooks and movies

Relaxing your pets with music, audiobooks and movies

Is it possible to relax stressed pets by playing them music, audiobooks or watching movies? Dr Jo explores recent studies that look at effects audio and visual media have on our pets…

Pets can get stressed

Maybe it’s your pampered pooch at home who shakes at the sound of fireworks or who hates being left alone. Or it’s the shelter dog who paces their kennel or barks at every passing person. Anxiety is common in our cats and dogs. All petss need the opportunity to relax.

Music calms dogs

We are finding our more and more about the effects on pets with music being played to them.

When kennelled dogs are played a variety of musical styles, including rock, pop and classical music, the dogs make most noise when listening to Metallica. But classical music calms them down, making them rest more and stand up less. Pop music makes little difference to their behaviour.

It appears, however, to be really important to stay away from heavy metal music, as this may have dogs shaking in their paws!

When dogs are exposed to classical music over a week, their heart rate decreases indicative of a reduction in their stress levels, although their salivary cortisol levels (also indicative of stress) don’t change. During periods of listening to music, kennelled dogs spend more time sitting or lying down and less time standing and barking. Interestingly male dogs responded more to this auditory stimulation than females. Effects may decrease over time, so we really need to know more about the degree of exposure we give dogs to this form of stress release. 

Pets with music: Variety is the key

We can’t play classical music to dogs all of the time. Not only might it be difficult for many humans to withstand, dogs also habituate (get used to) to this type of music and the positive effects are lessened over time.

More recent research has expanded the investigation of pets with music genres and their effect on dogs. Dogs were played soft rock, Motown pop, reggae and classical to see if increasing the variety of musical types kept the positive effects going.

Results showed that all music increased lying down time, regardless of genre. Dogs were more inclined to bark when the music stopped. Soft rock and reggae decreased stress levels while, in this study, Motown, pop and classical has less effect. Changing the types of music did, however, appear to keep the relaxation effects going over time.

Relaxing your pets with music is easy when you plan. Read our tips below to find out when to do this.