Some dog breeds are more trainable than others and within that, each individual dog has its own temperament and ability to be trained. I am assuming in my description below that the dog responds to verbal correction. If the dog doesn’t respond well to verbal correction, that is outside of my skill set.
I would recommend that someone with the dog howling problem should take intentional training sessions to work with the dog (instead of trying to do it alongside practicing… because that will just get frustrating). What I would do is have the dog in the same room where I intend to flute and choose to play a short amount of music. Maybe just one A part. If the dog remained quiet, I would enthusiastically praise the dog and give it a treat. If the dog begins to bark, I would stop playing and verbally correct the dog. Once the dog stopped howling, I would try the short amount of music again. If it doesn’t do well with that much music, maybe even trying less.
The sessions could start out pretty short. If a normally vocal dog lets you get through a whole song without barking, it might be worth stopping early anyway.
Basically, you don’t want the dog to think that howling or barking will make the music stop; you should be intentional to reward the dog for not howling.
My fluting once caught a toad’s attention. In the course of going from one shrub to another it stopped midway, oriented itself to face me, and it appeared to be listening. It stayed that way for almost a minute; then it seemed to remember that in the open it was in a vulnerable position, and proceeded on to better cover. I would never have expected a toad to respond to music in such a fashion. But a fish? Even more fascinating.
Squirrels are of course always curious.
No dog, but I did have a critic in one of my cats. Or a sensei, depending on how you look at it. Whenever I trotted out a new tune she would let me know what she thought of my efforts: If it was going well she would act crazy, doing somersaults in the armchair and shooting me wild, bug-eyed looks in an attempt to make me laugh and break the flow. If my playing was substandard, she would just give me this weary “Don’t lose your day job” look. Very humbling, but also interesting to know that apparently she could tell when a tune she’d never heard before wasn’t working! She was discerning, that one.
Ha ! well I seen a video of a kid playing a Concertina next to field of milk cows, and amazingly all the cows cross the entire field to stand attentively and listen. I don’t have any thing like that to report, but know that our birds here love Banjo music, because when there is they sing a lot more.
That reminds me. A few years back, I was in the north-eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo and (through a roundabout series of events too long to talk about here) visited with a shepherd. Shepherds in the community spent most of their time in the fields with their cows, so they made flutes just to burn the time. And I remember being told, “The flute brings joy to the heart of the cows.”
And I’ve always loved that: “the flute brings joy to the heart of the cows.”
Our animals (1 dog, 7 cats, 3 parrots) never seem to mind us playing instruments at home. There are two execeptions, however: The parrots love the sound of a guitar or a bouzouki (they start dancing) and the dog hates the sound of the nyckelharpa ands starts whining
When I was living up the bush on a property next to a farm here in Australia, while practising tin whistle all the cows from next door would come and put their noses over the wire fence, a couple of dozen of them, and listen with big eyes and rapt attention. The moment I stopped for a minute, they would start to wander off. If I started playing again, they all came back!
Whether they enjoyed it or not is hard to say, but they were definitely fascinated. Haven’t cowherds and shepherds used flutes for thousands of years? Very interesting.
