Blog Post

Ellen Simmons • Apr 16, 2020

Soundproofing an Animal Enclosure

As a country, the idea of owning a pet completes a home for a lot of families. In many cases this is something that people have grown up with within their household from childhood. In fact, the PDSA who work with YouGov to carry out a survey annually have found that 50% of UK adults own a pet in a variety of shapes and sizes! It has also been observed that animals and pets have a positive impact on human mental health and can reduce anxiety and stress.

However, they can also be quite noisy and alerted by their surroundings. We have had an increasing amount of enquiries from pet owners, ranging from soundproofing dog kennels to chicken coops. Unfortunately soundproofing these enclosures is nearly impossible to achieve.

The Science behind soundproofing

To soundproof a surface such as a wall, we need to do the following things:

Improve the mass of the surface - This is normally achieved by adding different high mass/density products.

Improve the ability of the surface to absorb sound energy and vibrations. Without this, the addition of the mass will have very little impact.

Use different materials of high mass. Different materials perform better for different sound frequencies so using a combination of high mass materials will always perform better than simply using more of the same material.

In addition to this, sound energy travels a lot like water, and we need to think of soundproofing like waterproofing. Any small gaps need to be sealed up with acoustic sealant to prevent sound travelling through.

How to Soundproof a Wall with the SoundBoard 4™ System

Can you Soundproof the Walls of an animal enclosure?

When you put all the above together, you would effectively be creating an airtight chamber. Unfortunately for your pet within their enclosure this would mean that they wouldn’t be able to breathe, and you would have to drill holes in the soundproofing to allow for this, essentially rendering the soundproofing ineffective. (Back to our analogy of soundprrofing being like waterproofing).

The only realistic option if you were just going to treat a cage is to cover the cage in a heavy, but breathable blanket like material. This will help absorb some of the sound, but still allow air to pass through, however soundproofing results will be very limited.

Please remember that if you were to do this, you would need to leave a sizable gap at the bottom of the blanket for ventilation! A top tip leading on from this would be to have the gap facing away from the direction of neighbours houses, to ensure that the majority of sound isn't travelling their way.

What if my pet is getting distressed by noises from outside your house?

We’ve discussed the scenario where pets within an enclosure are the noise culprits. However, there is another situation we are increasingly being asked about- fireworks from outside spooking our pets. As much as we may enjoy a fireworks display, our pets can find loud noises very stressful.

Another common scenario which gets brought to our attention is dogs barking from indoors being heard outside of a property.

Our advice for both of the above is as follows:

1. An obvious tip would be to close the windows and any external doors as these are essentially large holes between you and the outside world.

2. If step one hasn’t helped your pet enough, look into upgrading and replacing your existing windows and external doors along with their frames to help minimise any gaps these may have around them.

3. Soundproofing the wall itself if the first two steps have been followed. We would point you towards addressing the windows and doors firstly as these are the obvious weak points. An external wall tends to be built much thicker with a lot more mass and density than your internal walls. Contacting a window glazing company would be your first port of call for this.

Blue Cross For Pets have some more specialist tips for you to follow and contact details.

We do hope this has been helpful for you, we wish there could be more we could do for your pets and as much as we love them, they do pose some dilemmas noise wise!

"We don’t expect you to become an overnight expert in soundproofing, that’s what we’re here for."

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