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.