Do you put the radio on for the dog when you go out? It won’t keep your pet calm, study finds

If you’re a dog owner, you probably know the guilt of leaving your pet at home alone when you have to go out — especially after the pandemic, which for lots of people meant two years of being in the house much of the time, and so being able to shower your dog with attention. But if you’d hoped that leaving the radio on when you went out would help lessen your pet’s separation anxiety, it actually doesn’t make much difference, according to new research from Queen’s University Belfast.

Past research showed that classical music had a calming effect on dogs in chronically stressful situations, so researchers set about testing if it would also relax dogs separated from their owners for a short time. The findings, published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, showed that classical music had only a moderately calming effect on the 82 dogs studied, and no welfare benefits were recorded when audiobooks were played to them.

But the dogs exposed to classical music were significantly faster to lie down and settle than those that were played audiobooks — which spent more time gazing at the speaker.

The leader of the study, Dr Deborah Wells, of the animal-behaviour centre at the university’s school of psychology, says classical music and audiobooks were seen to calm dogs down in situations of high stress, such as in rescue kennels. For domestic dogs separated from their owners for a short period of time, however, the findings show that the type of audio has “little value”.