WASHINGTON — Do dogs have a favorite kind of music? A new study suggests they do.
Researchers from the Scottish SPCA and the University of Glasgow played a variety of genres of music — soft rock, Motown, pop, reggae and classical — for dogs at a shelter in Dumbarton, Scotland, and tracked their heart rates and behavior, the BBC reports.
Overall, the dogs’ two favorite genres were reggae and soft rock — perhaps good advice for what to leave on when leaving your four-footed friends alone at home.
This research builds on an earlier study, which found that the dogs like classical music, but only for a short time — as little as a day in some cases, the BBC reported at the time.
So this time, researchers mixed it up and found the dogs reacted well to any kind of music, but on an individual basis, and professor Neil Evans said, “the response to different genres was mixed, highlighting the possibility that like humans, our canine friends have their own individual music preferences.”
