You may wonder whether or not your dog’s hearing is better than ours. The truth is that dogs hear low pitched sounds about the same as we do however their hearing of higher pitched sounds is far superior than ours.  When we are very young, our upper end hearing range is about 30,000 cycles per second.  By the time that we are young adults, our upper range slips to about 20,000 cycles per second.  By the time we are in our mid sixties, our upper range is about 12,000 cycles per second. Dogs have an upper range of about 35,000 to 40,000 cycles per second. There was some research done on this in Russia and they found that a dogs upper range could be as high as 100,000 cycles per second.

If your dog suddenly lifts his ears and becomes alert, he may be hearing a high pitched squealing of a mouse which is totally inaudible to us. They have the ability to hear sounds which to us are ultrasonic. When your dog suddenly becomes very attentive and runs to the door, he is hearing someone coming long before a human would be able to detect it. When you are walking your dog and he suddenly breaks away from his dog leash and runs to what seems to be nowhere, he is actually hearing a bird, squirrel or other animal so far away that we would never be able to hear it!