When the fireworks start, Cabbie runs to her grandma and curls up at her feet, where she’ll stay until the din ends, often hours later. If the celebration sounds like an extended battle scene from Saving Private Ryan, she might even leap into grandma’s lap. When thunderstorms loudly roll in, DaVinci darts for the nearest safe space in his Houston area home, where he’ll remain until the cacophony of the tempest has passed.
Cabbie and DaVinci are dogs, the anxious sorts. According to recent research, they’re not alone. In a 2020 Finnish study of 14,000 dogs of various breeds, researchers said 75 percent of all dogs exhibit at least one anxiety-related behavior with noise sensitivity being the most common. In Houston, where summertime isolated storms and hurricanes arrive with little warning and holidays like Independence Day are observed with deafening neighborhood pyrotechnics, our canine family members routinely encounter these fears.
But, help from another loyal friend – namely music – might be key to calming canine nerves. Streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music and especially YouTube are now awash with music designed to knock back the nervousness our pets feel in these instances. Type the phrase “music for anxious dogs” into your search engine and you’re likely to find everything from “calming music for puppies,” to a 20-hour-long video to ease separation anxiety.
These offerings are ubiquitous and well-intended, but do they work? They do, according to Amman Ahmed, who runs Relax My Dog. Ahmed and composer Ricardo Henriquez began the company in 2011. At the time, Henriquez was looking for ways to calm anxiety in his own dog, Rocky. They were living in El Salvador in an environment fraught with political unrest and violence. The experimental music they created has now helped more than 40 million dogs world-over, according to Ahmed.
“Basically we’ve been doing this for a long time and there’s a lot of research that we’ve put into what we’re doing. We create everything in house. We have music producers in house, film producers, and everything is based on our own research,” Ahmed said. “Thunderstorms, bad weather, fireworks, whatever it is, it really, really does help have a massive impact on the mental health of your dog or cat to calm them down as much as possible.”
One of the 40 million dogs helped by Relax My Dog’s content is Cabbie, the five year-old beauty who lives in our home when her owner, our musician daughter, is on tour. We’ve dialed up content from the site – which also offers subscriptions for avid users – to mitigate her storm anxiety. Ahmed said a team of about 10 creates audio and video content exploring a range of frequencies to find the best tones to tone down Fido. And feedback from families like ours is most instrumental to Relax My Dog’s ongoing efforts.
“We take that feedback – we have such a big audience, millions and millions of dogs and cats using our service – so we know what works and what doesn’t work and it helps us to improve always moving forward,” Ahmed said.
“The reason why we took that approach is because you can go do tests in a lab or whatever but you will always be limited to maybe 10, 20, 30 dogs. Our perspective was like we want you, the dog owner, to give us feedback and help us develop this together,” he continued. “Every dog is so individual. Every pug, every French bulldog – you break it down, they’re so individual, so it’s important that we always listen to our fan base and take their feedback as much as possible because they are the ones that are going to be using our products, therefore they should be the ones helping us drive the development rather than a scientist in a lab. The approach that we’ve taken obviously clearly works and we want to continue that way.”
Nayeli Plata and her husband Jon use music to calm their eight year-old Miniature Schnauzer, DaVinci.
“He tends to hide, either in a closet or under the bend, and he would start shaking. If he’s not hiding then he’s just pacing back and forth, just to express ‘I’m anxious, I need attention,’” she said of DaVinci’s nerves, which get agitated by storms, fireworks and encountering strangers.
“I have his thunder jacket, which we put on him, and we’ll go to the closet with him sometimes so he’ll feel like he’s not alone,” she said. “We do put some music on or just some background noise if it’s like a thunderstorm just to kind of blend the sound out so it’s not bothering
him as much.”
Plata and her husband are music fans with diverse tastes. The couple listens to everything from Red Hot Chili Peppers to the Spanish folk metal band Mägo de Oz. Plata said they choose different music to help DaVinci.
“We do use the anxiety music for dogs or sometimes we’ll turn up the TV to whatever we’re watching,” she said. “I’ve heard classical music works sometimes. I haven’t used that too much.”
Paige Storez recommends Debussy for DaVinci. Storz is a certified dog trainer whose services are available through her business, Raise the Woof: Your Local Dog Therapist. She spent 10 years in veterinary medicine as a vet tech and has worked with the Alvin Police Department and a board and train facility in that area to help dogs and dog owners.
“Classical music on the dog brain is supposed to have profound effects,” noted Storz. “There have been several studies that have shown that those tones just actively affect the part of the dog’s brain that teaches them how to relax, essentially. When a dog is fully relaxed and that part of the brain is working, that’s when the music comes in and continues to help. But, for a severe enough dog it’s just not enough.”
In those cases, Storz recommends training. Some dogs may need anxiety meds prescribed by a vet. Storz said using music is fine, it’s how the music is used that matters most.
“We’re not going to play heavy metal music for dogs that are freaking out about fireworks, right? We want to come in and give them the energy that we want,” she said. She recommends using the music ahead of a potentially traumatic night of fireworks and to use it sparingly.
“We would play a Spotify playlist that would desensitize the dogs to the noise without overstimulating them,” she said of her experience using music to ease anxiety. “I would set up a bowl of high value treats, not your normal treats, think hot dogs and things like that, something that’s really going to encourage them to eat despite their fear and their anxiety.”
She said the dogs would listen to the music and if they showed good response to the dulcet tones they’d get a reward. By the time the practice had to be put into play for actual fireworks, there was some base from which to work.
Even though some dog anxiety YouTube videos boast 10- or 20-hour airtimes, Storez said less is better when using music in this capacity.
“I might start with 10 minutes of that. We don’t want to flood the dog, we don’t want to overwhelm their central nervous system, we want to take it pretty easy, especially if the dog’s severe. But for your mild cases you can go ahead and shoot up to 30 minutes or so, it just really depends on the case. We’re teaching the dog, it’s very Pavlov, right? They ring the bell, they get that treat, they get that positive reinforcement. And then they start to learn, ‘Hey, you know, the noises are not that bad.’ So, this is something that you can do all year.”
Storz made it even simpler by asking whether we’d find five hours of music soothing were it played loudly atop five hours of booming fireworks. Probably not.
“You’re basically just masking that and they can hear through it. You’re essentially teaching them that the music doesn’t do anything for them. You’re reinforcing the behaviors that you don’t want which is what a lot of owners do unintentionally.”
Storz shared a wealth of information, much more than space here allows, but she said she treats dogs on a case-by-case basis in her practice, reminding us that anxious behaviors might be similar but each dog is different. She looks at genetics vs. behavior, another important distinction addressed in that Finnish study. Plata, for instance, might be interested to know the study showed Miniature Schnauzers like DaVinci commonly shared a fear of strangers.
“A lot of my training comes from a little bit of human perspective too, you know?” Storz said. “We talk about how we’re going to therapy, we’re trying to address certain things, so that healing and that recovery time is not linear and I apply that same method to my dogs, based on my experiences with them.”
Storz concludes that music is a good salve for these anxieties, but she recommends training for the best long-term results.
“I am obsessed with what I do so sharing the educational aspect of it and trying to encourage others in that aspect is really, really important to me,” she said. “It’s a profound thing and I love to share it. It’s important that everyone knows it.”
Ahmed and Plata agreed.
“We know (Relax My Dog) has an impact because now we get messages from dog owners that have been using our content for years and years and years and saying ‘This is the only thing that helps calm down my dog’s anxiety, this is the only thing that made things less stressful for my dog,’” Ahmed said. “We get messages saying, ‘My dog passed away, can I use your music for the funeral because this was my dog’s favorite song and I want to remember my dog in this way.’ To know that we’ve touched lives in that way leaves us speechless, absolutely speechless.”
“DaVinci has been such a big part of my life, he’s my baby, and I got him when I was old enough to be responsible but young enough where I still needed to learn a lot of things,” Plata said. “We kind of grew up together. It was just me and him that moved away from my parents and joined, I guess, like a new family and I’m still wanting to be the best parent I can be to him because to me he’s the baby of the house. His needs come before anybody else’s.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
