Music influence on the behaviour of sheltered dogs

There are a large number of previous researches on the effects of listening to music for different species, including humans, dairy cows, wild animals in captivity and even dogs.1 Dogs can be kept in kennels for a variety of reasons, such as laboratory purposes, housing work-dogs or in shelters. The life in a shelter means physical and social restraint, therefore dogs generally show the signs of stress after having arrived in it.2 The supply with toys improved only the state of experimental dogs, but not for kennel ones.3 The influence of displaying human voice is not clear:4 while Wells et al.,5 found the radio ineffective, on the other hand, the listening of audio books proved to be beneficial.6 The general mood of dog is influenced by the type of the music, too. In a study with 117 dogs the heavy metal music caused nervousness and trembling.7 On the other hand, a series of different genre of music (motown, soft rock, pop, reggae and classical) was able to decrease the stress level of dogs. The most powerful were the soft rock and the reggae, but the no musical treatment mitigated the barking. Owing to the individual differences in the taste of the animals, the deviation of data was big.4 This phenomenon is known in human, too.8 The shelters are noisy premises, therefore the use of a well-chosen background music may do a lot of good. The purpose of this research was to reduce general stress level of dogs.