Season’s greetings: Let the light shine… sans the loud explosion

Kaboom! A-bombs being set off is hardly music to the ears of humanity. The same logic applies to pets when it comes to firecrackers. They get horrified, traumatised and even physically hurt at myriad instances when we humans typically ‘celebrate’ festive occasions with explosive fireworks.

Let’s see how and why.

Dogs, by nature’s design, have acutely sensitive hearing ability and they get frightened not only by an explosion. Any source that emanates loud noises, such as the vacuum cleaner, hard rock blaring out of loudspeakers, guns, motorcycles and thunder, can scare the daylights out of them.

While the audio frequency range of humans is between 12 Hz and 20 kHz, their tailed counterparts can hear in frequencies ranging from approximately 40 Hz to 60 kHz. So, dogs’ hearing bandwidth is over twice as much as humans and they can hear sound up to four times farther than us humans. A little firecracker at our frontyard literally means an earth-shattering nuclear bomb effect to our pets.

Humans’ normal conversational range is around 60 decibels (dB) and a mere 25-point spike is good enough to cause irreversible damage to our ear drum, including tinnitus and hearing loss. The explosion of a firework can emit sounds of up to 190 dB (contrastingly, gunshot stands at 140 dB). Now, just imagine the plight of your pets which are bound to hear a much more amplified sound.

Let’s celebrate our festivals with cheers and lights. Less noise and pollution will only make the occasion better for our pets. As well as us.