Everyone who has lived with a dog has witnessed that moment when an ambulance passes and the dog, for some reason, begins to howl hard. There are those who believe that it is due to the pain they feel in their ears sensitive to the sound, but in reality it is not. It has to do with their ancestors.
There are two reasons why dogs howl at the sound, according to experts. One of them is because they confuse it with other howls and take it as a sign of help from another lost. This goes back to the ancestors of dogs, wolves, who howl when a member of the pack walks away from the group so they can find their way back. For dogs, who have no idea what a siren is, an ambulance or a police car, it is another animal communicating with them.
The other reason has to do with having detected a threat. This sound is unknown to dogs and therefore they howl to alert the pack leader (ie the human "owner" of the dog) that something happens in their environment and must be alert. If the ambulance and its siren are moving away, the dog could relate that to its howling and believe that it managed to scare away the threat, so the next time there is an ambulance nearby will again howl.
The sound of the siren does not cause pain to the dogs. If they do, the experts say they would not howl but run and hide nervous, just as they do when they hear fireworks.
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-- Kacawote --