It is nearing the 4th of July, and there have been articles online that have laughingly talked about training your dog not to become phobic or frightened of fireworks.
Dogs hate fireworks because it HURTS their ears! Their hearing is four times more acute than the hearing of human beings.This hurt goes beyond the physical. Deafening noise sets off extreme stress and panic.
The insensitive yahoos and rednecks who set off fireworks in their neighborhoods forget (or don't care) that animals, including birds and wild animals, have a sense of hearing that is many times more acute and sensitive than ours. Animals and birds also have a far broader range of frequencies that they can hear. We have seen creatures, include birds, go into frenzied hysteria and high stress when fireworks were exploded nearby. Many of our friends actually spend the 4th of July with their animals in their basements, trying to soothe them.
The worst places to set off fireworks are in the countryside. This does damage to the songbirds, with their incredibly delicate sense of hearing, who cannot flee in the night. Neither do the wildlife have basements to which they can retreat.
Imagine the world of dogs, cats and birds, where the noise of fireworks sounds not just double, but four, five or six times louder. It hurts. It stresses.
When armies or terrorists take people as prisoners, they sometimes use loud music as a form of torture, because noise creates immense, inescapable stress. Some human beings are tremendously sound sensitive; their hearing does not become as badly damaged as a bird's or cat's or dog's hearing will become from being exposed to fireworks, but the emotional stress is awful for them.
While a community fireworks celebration on the 4th of July is always entertaining, it is sad to see increased sales of private fireworks and to hear them year-round, for cruel and thoughtless backyard explosions impact every living creature for miles around.
