I have just returned from the past, where everything is wonderful.
It’s no secret that dogs have a much keener sense of smell than humans. But while we can easily see that dogs rely on their sense of smell much more than we do, we are mostly unaware of the vast quantity of information available to dogs through their noses.
Surprisingly, while dogs have been living with humans for thousands of years, no one actually knows how strong their sense of smell is. Estimates range from 10,000 times as sensitive as humans to 100,000 times as sensitive. Since dogs can’t – or won’t – tell us, it is difficult to determine exactly what information they can obtain through smell.
But research continues, and some things are fairly certain. Here are five things you might not have realized about your best friend’s nose:
- A dog’s nose is better-designed than yours. Your nose is a like a leaky shed out behind the garden, useful mostly to keep the rain off a handful of rarely-used shovels and rakes. A dog’s nose, on the other hand, is like a nuclear-powered submarine. Exquisitely designed, meticulously constructed, and fantastically well-adapted to its operating environment.
- Dogs have a scent-detecting organ that you don’t have. This explains some of the discrepancy between their ability and yours, but not all of it. This extra organ is called the vomeronasal organ and it helps dogs detect pheromones.
- Dogs smell in 3-D. This is not the title of a budget flick, but instead, is a statement that helps explain how dogs can track someone. In the same way that your eyes combine two slightly different perspectives to create depth perception, a dog senses a scent separately through each nostril. This enables them to detect which direction a person was traveling in when they left behind a scent by recognizing in which direction a scent is getting stronger and in which direction it is getting weaker.
- Dogs can small certain medical conditions in humans. If you are diabetic, your dog can detect sharp drops in your blood sugar by smelling isoprene – which rises significantly as your blood sugar drops – on your breath. Dogs can also detect cancer cells, which, apparently, have a different scent than healthy cells.
- Dog noses are cold, wet time machines. When you walk down a sidewalk, you can see, and, when the weather is right, smell someone else walking toward you. But your dog not only knows who is there now, he can tell, by the scents they left behind, who was on the sidewalk an hour ago, a day ago, and, if their hygiene was poor enough, a week ago.
July 6, 2018