Has anyone had any success desensitising a dog to fireworks? Our rescue dog is terrified of fireworks, and will hide under the bed. We’ve tried doing desensitisation by playing fireworks sounds on a speaker, but he can tell they’re not the real thing.
Loud outside noises like fireworks, thunder, sirens, etc. freak dogs and animals out because there is no apparent cause and effect. They’re just random, and don’t come from an identifiable source other than “outside.” Despite the popularly repeated advice, playing fireworks noises over your stereo speakers is not going to do anything for your dog nor train him in any way what those noises are or what’s causing them. Your dog isn’t fooled — he knows very well you initiated the speaker noises, because he watched you do it and he’s watched you make other speaker noises like TV and music the same way before. But by the same token dogs have no concept of abstract concepts so it’s no good trying to explain to him that your fireworks Youtube video or whatever is supposed to be the “same” thing as what he’s scared of. Because to him, it isn’t.
The only thing that worked for my dog back when was making the fireworks event participatory. Just randomly subjecting them to loud bangs isn’t going to do it. Take him outside to see the fireworks and stay with him, preferably with yourself and other members of your household visibly enjoying yourselves. Not coincidentally, this is also basically what you have to do with hunting dogs (and horses, for that matter) to desensitize them to gunfire.
Fireworks are especially tricky because they’re usually far enough away that there’s a large delay between the visual event and the noise. Trying to explain the concept of the difference between the speed of light and speed of sound to a dog is, naturally, likely to be difficult [citation needed].
My previous dog was a puppy when the local baseball team won the world series
We took him outside to pee after the game, and the neighbor behind us started shooting off fireworks
The first couple spooked him a little and he kind of looked to us for how he should react, he saw we weren’t bothered so he settled down and joined up watching the fireworks. After a couple he watched them shoot up in the air, explode, and then looked excitedly towards the neighbors to see if they were going to shoot off another.
And so began a lifelong love of fireworks for him. Any time he heard them he’d run around to the windows, tail wagging, happy as could be, trying to get a glimpse of them.
We got my current dog at about a year old, so I’m not sure what, if anything, they did to desensitize her to fireworks, but she just doesn’t react at all. I actually use them as a good opportunity to take her for a walk since she has issues with other dogs and I know no one else is gonna be walking theirs.
It may also be worth considering the breeds. The first dog was a boxer/lab mix, so half of him was technically a hunting dog, and my current dog is a Malinois, which are used by a lot of police/military, so in both cases they were breeds that you’d expect to be alright around things like gunshots and explosions.
EDIT: somewhat similar, my first childhood dog was terrified of fireworks, thunder… Really pretty much everything. She never really got over that, but she found a couple spaces in her house where she’d go and cower and feel relatively safe. We originally lived about a block away from a firehouse, and she heard their siren go off fairly frequently but never paid it much attention. Then we moved, and ended up just a couple doors away from another firehouse. Again, she never seemed to pay it much attention until one day she happened to be outside when it started going off. After about 10 years of newer paying any attention to sirens she decided now was the time to start howling at it. We’d never heard her howl before, she seemed kind of unsure about what she was doing herself, but she didn’t seem afraid. We of course thought this was hilarious, and encouraged it, so she would occasionally manage a weak little howl when she heard the siren from then on out.
So when we got our next dog, the one who like fireworks, we of course encouraged him to howl at the siren as well. He took right to it, boxers kind of tend to be pretty vocal dogs to begin with and he definitely took after that half of his ancestry, so he’d hear the siren and start howling, he wasn’t very good at it, it was usually a pretty weak, hoarse-sounding howl, but he happily obliged us. One day though, my mom was on the phone trying to make a doctor’s appointment or something when the siren started going off. Since she was busy on the phone and didn’t acknowledge him, he started to follow her around the house howling louder and louder at her, to show her that he was doing it and wouldn’t stop until the siren ended.
My beagle was fascinated by the oldschool rotary siren still in use with the local fire station when I was a kid. It was a solid mile or so away from our house but obviously quite audible. They did a test run on it every Sunday morning at seemingly increasingly earlier hours, probably specifically to annoy all the proto-Karens who sent snippy letters to them about it, or wrote in to the papers.
If you don’t know or you’ve never heard one of these, they take quite a while to wind down as the flywheel or whatever it is coasts after it’s turned off, slowly losing speed with the pitch going lower and lower and lower. When it got down into the very low registers, my dog’s favorite thing to do was trying to match its pitch by howling back at it. Obviously with decreasing success the lower the note went. Aroooooooouuuuuuwwwwwwrrrrrr…rrrr…rr…rr…r…r…
My town also did a yearly fireworks display on the 4th and how I got him to get over that was by bodily picking his dumb ass up and carrying him to the field overlooking the valley into town, so he could see what was going on. That was the congregation spot for everyone from all the local neighborhoods to sit and watch, so this also usually wound up with him being able to scam a hot dog or a hamburger off of somebody. After a couple of years of that it was him dragging me off to that field on the end of his leash.
For whatever reason he maintained a lifelong hate-on for the sound of skateboard and rollerblade wheels. If anyone ever went by our house on either of above he’d go absolutely ballistic. He didn’t care about bicycles or scooters or even loud motorcycles.