IS YOUR DOG SOUND SENSITIVE? Rex Specs partnered with Zeteo Tech and Dr. Peter M. Skip Scheifele, PhD - a leading animal audiologist in the United States - to help create dog hearing protection for the military, active working dogs, and your everyday adventure pup. Rex Specs Ear Pro will muffle environmental noise for your mate – whether it's in a plane or helicopter, during a thunderstorm, or fireworks. Rex Specs Ear Pro helps dogs manage situations where uncomfortable or triggering noise levels occur. Does your dog work in an environment with high levels of noise? Exposure to high levels or extended periods of sound can result in something called NIHL -- or Noise Induced Hearing Loss -- in dogs. This danger is especially real for military, police, search and rescue, service, and hunting dogs, all of whom are exposed to a wide range of both sights and sounds throughout the course of their day. For both the working dog and the handler, a dog’s hearing is an essential element of safety. Working dogs need to be able to take in their surroundings and hear commands, but when dogs suffer from NIHL they can’t do this as well, thereby putting everyone in danger. Similar to humans, dogs can get NIHL from any form of prolonged loud noise like truck or helicopter transportation, gunfire, or even a loud nearby construction site. Read more about NIHL below. REX SPECS EAR PRO FEATURES FITTING YOUR DOG ABOUT NOISE INDUCED HEARING LOSS Here's what leading animal audiologist Dr. Scheifele has to say about NIHL. What Is Noise Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL)?Noise induced hearing loss is what happens to the ear if it is exposed to prolonged sounds that are within the range of the animal’s hearing frequency and is loud enough to cause the stereocilia, which are the top of the hair cells in the inner ear, to fatigue. They (the stereocilia) will eventually fatigue to the point that they will not operate anymore, therefore the brain cannot get any sound from the ear.How Do You Tell if a Dog has NIHL?We run an actual audiological test called a BAER test – we call it a bear test even though it's not spelled like bear. This is an electrophysiological test that tells us what the dog’s hearing threshold is in each ear. Hearing threshold being defined as what level does the dog actually hear the sound at the time of testing.. Generally we run these on puppies and when we run a BAER screening test on a puppy, we put in a very loud sound to the ear that the ear should absolutely be able to hear. If the dog's ear and brain is not reactive to the sound then that puppy is deaf. In an older dog, we would run through a series of different intensities and wherever the intensity stops – where the waveforms no longer conform to one another, then we know that the dog can hear up to that point but not afterward. What are Some Situations in Which a Dog May Experience NIHL?There are actually many situations. But the bottom line is any kind of noise that is prolonged and intense within the frequency range that they can hear can cause hearing loss. For example, dogs that are kennelled (larger kennels in shelters, or in working dog environments that are typically not built to dampen sound) are exposed to the noise of barking, etc. Dogs that are shot over, or exposed to gunfire regularly - like hunting dogs - may experience NIHL. Even dogs that are kept in situations that are very noisy outside of the homes. Any of those things can cause a hearing loss. TECHNICAL SPECS We have adopted the best practices used by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to conduct real ear testing on dogs to determine the effectiveness of Rex Specs Ear Pro. These tests were run at lower frequencies as they are the hardest to attenuate. Real ear testing was conducted in a sound booth with the noise exposure set to 95 dB A (white noise). 95dB A examples: tractor, blender, motorcycle, power tools, Bell UH-1 helicopter . See graph below for results. At very low frequencies (20Hz – 120Hz) Rex Specs Ear Pro attenuates, or reduces the noise exposure between 18 dB A and 24 dB A. As the frequency increases, so does the effectiveness of the product.
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