Just wondering what the range of everyone else's experience here is with sound sensitivity and their B's.
Ever since we adopted her, we've noticed that Bowpi is very sensitive to all kinds of sharp hitting or clicking sounds. She doesn't exactly freak out, but she's pretty quick to leave the room if anyone is clapping, slapping their knee, play-fighting, or basically anything that resembles hitting. She did streak out of the room once when I was swatting a fly, even though I wasn't even swatting in her direction. She also bolted away from an area of a park once when we suddenly stumbled across a group kendo practice (Japanese martial arts with sticks). There's a baseball field by our house, and Bowpi will pull really hard if we're walking by and they happen to be practice batting.
Her unease with these kinds of things kind of makes sense to me, but she's also really sensitive to even lighter noises like the sound of nail clippers (human clippers, that is – she can't stand to be in the same room as anyone clipping their nails) and the sound of my camera shutter, which sadly makes it difficult to get pictures of her at ease around my noisy DSLR.
Conservation of energy (She may look comfy, but I can tell she's starting to get uncomfortable in this shot)
FWIW, she's okay with loud music, traffic, general city sounds… and she didn't seem unusually freaked out over the Fourth of July, especially when she was home. It's very specific types of noises in close proximity that she doesn't like.
I'm not sure that I can desensitize her to these kinds of sounds, especially since she goes from calm to OVER THRESHOLD in just an instant. Mostly we just avoid doing the things that we know will distress her. My boyfriend wonders if her extreme sensitivity to "hitting" actions and noises suggests that she was in a violent home before us -- not that she was abused, but that maybe there were other similarly disturbing things going on around her. I don't know if that's a fair extrapolation. We know very little about her previous home, other than there were some personal dynamics that led up to her rehoming. Could it just be "a basenji thing"?