When leaving my apartment, I make sure to leave the radio on for my cat. I like to think the songs are a satisfactory substitute for the voices that fill the apartment when people are home. Then again, perhaps the music is nothing more than a nuisance to my feline friend.
“It’s something that people have wanted to know for a long time,” says Pralle Kriengwatana, a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven in Belgium. “And there are more and more studies on it.”
But by and large, she says, those studies have focused on one simple question — what effect does music have on non-human animals? — without taking into consideration how or why these effects come about.
In a paper published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science last year, Kriengwatana and her colleagues at the University of Glasgow propose an alternative research framework. It first asks what animals actually hear when exposed to music, then applies this to specific welfare goals.
