Kosh the cattle dog is on a personal mission to kill every FedEx truck in existence, with a secondary focus on UPS and the weekly trash trucks. He will wake up from a sound sleep, translocate onto the couch to look out the window to see if he can spot the truck then he barks his shrillest volley of screambarks, then grabs his blankie and whips it back and forth in a frenzy of destructive mania. He keeps on doing this until the sound of the truck engine has dopplered down the street. He reacts a bit to the mail truck and alerts when an Amazon delivery person comes down the cul de sac but not quite as floridly as he does to a big diesel box truck. Reverse beeps drive him even more mental than engine sounds. He takes his job Very Seriously.
Years ago I turned down the street I lived on but several blocks from home and surprised my outdoor cat much too far from home for anyone’s comfort level. As soon as he clocked my engine sound he turned tail and ran for home as fast as lightning, it was a real Ferris Bueller situation there. He beat me home by a split second and did his very best nonchalant “What?” act but he was totally busted.
The critters know every vehicle that regularly comes down your street, depend on it.
When I lived out in the country as a kid, I could hear the school bus doors open at the neighbor kids’ house about a mile away (as the crow flies) (there were NO other traffic sounds out there at that time of day). I’m not surprised that a dog might be able to do as well on sounds that to him are as distinctive, even in a more complex sonic environment.
This entire thread – so far – seems to rest on the assumptions that (1) a dog or cat CAN detect something and act appropriately, yet other times (2) does NOT act similarly, and (3) that there is a connection between cause and effect. I don’t see that any of this has yet been demonstrated.
Before you can search for a cause, you should be sure that the phenomena actually exists. If it does (or appears to be), you then have to confirm the connection, not merely the coincidence of two (possibly unrelated) events.
So…Has a log been kept of EVERY time, EVERY day, and EVERY event or non-event? Do the animal’s reactions happen at ONLY certain times or others with no apparent trigger?
How was the phenomena determined? By an impartial detection or observation device or person? If you expect a certain reaction at a certain time, are you primed to detect it?
Do the delivery visits happen at regular, expected times, or random intervals? Has anyone tried having a delivery truck come by at 3AM or on a holiday? That would be a useful test: if the dog reacted to an unexpected 3AM delivery, it would suggest an actual detection; if it did not, perhaps something else is happening (maybe the dog knows that middle-of-the-night deliveries never occur).
How many times when some action was expected that it DID NOT happen? These need to be logged as reliably as the ones that do, otherwise your statistics are skewed and unreliable.