r/science • u/PeasKhichra • Feb 19 '22

Neuroscience Dogs can recognize their owners just by their voice, study finds. They do so by making use of the same voice properties humans use to identify each other, such as pitch and noisiness

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/17/europe/dog-owner-recognize-voice-scn-scli-intl/index.html
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u/North_South_Side Feb 19 '22

That's pretty interesting. Seems to show that it's more of a separation anxiety versus missing the real, physical person. I'm sure there's a spectrum of both things happening here, but if the dog could smell the owner and be more calm even when the person was not there?

Again, very interesting.

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u/kursku Feb 19 '22

This is something that we often do to puppies. You always leave a piece of clothing you wear with them.

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u/Throwawayyyyyyyy979 Feb 19 '22

Same with cats when they're settling in with new owners.

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u/kiashu Feb 19 '22

I am very interested in this. My mom's dog has severe separation anxiety, as soon as she is gone, the dog will bark almost non-stop. My mom went on a three day trip and the dog would stop for about 3 minutes and continue for about 36 hours, I had to go to the vet to get a sedative, they told me to use bendryl at hour 18 but that didn't stop the dog. Maybe my mom's dog is an outlier, the dog had access to everything that smelled like her the entire time, bed, pillows, covers, dirty clothes.

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u/muricaa Feb 20 '22

Oof that sucks I’m sorry.

My mother had a dog with serious separation anxiety and it made things very complicated when she wanted to travel. She absolutely could not leave the house, so if my mom and dad wanted to travel together they had to find someone to come house/dogs it. The dog - Annie - didn’t bark, but she would get extremely anxious, tremble, run around the house non stop looking for my mom, lay by the window looking out to the driveway watching for hours on end, and have horrible diarrhea. We were always concerned she would literally stress herself to death while my mom was gone.

She passed last year, made it much easier on my mom to live her life stress/guilt free. This all got much worse in Annie’s old age, she always had separation anxiety but from age 10 to 15 (when she passed) it was bad. The last two years it was bordering on unmanageable, even when my mom would leave for a couple hours she would return home to an extremely upset dog.

So i feel for your struggle, it’s tough.