Dogs’ noses
Dogs’ noses are mind boggling. Everyone knows that dogs have a powerful sense of smell but just how powerful they are and how they use them is not something that many people are aware of. Dogs can be trained to use their nose to detect everything from bombs, cancers, truffles, property damp, endangered species and people across all kinds of industries ranging from police, to medicine, to property surveillance.
The dog’s nose and scent work is a whole area of research and study of its own but I thought I would share some of what I think are the most interesting and crazy facts about our furry friends’ noses:
- Dogs have 300 million scent receptors, compared to our measly 5 million
- They can smell 10,000 – 100,000 times better than us (depending on breed)
- The olfactory bulb (scent centre) in a dog’s brain is 40x larger than ours
- Dogs can inhale and exhale at the same time, using the slits at the side of their nose
- Dogs have an additional organ in the roof of their mouths which can detect if someone is unwell, happy, sad or angry based off the pheromones they release
- They can detect half a teaspoon of sugar in an Olympic sized swimming pool
- If we use vision as an analogy, what we could see 1/3 of a mile away, dogs could see 3,000 miles away – that’s the distance from London to New York!
- Dogs can smell the time of day, due to the scents released when the sun moves across the ground
- If you were to roll out a human’s olfactory (scent) system, it would be the size of an A4 sheet. A dog’s would be the size of a football pitch
- Dogs can smell in layers; they smell in 3D, like we see in 3D. Dogs’ nostrils can work independently from each other and then their brains put the information together to help dogs locate exactly where a smell is coming from
- Typically, working dogs like retrievers, spaniels and shepherds have an advantage in scent work over sight hounds or brachycephalic breeds. This is due to the fact that the number of scent receptors a dog has is limited by the length and shape of a dog’s muzzle
Scenting is highly stimulating, rewarding and tiring for dogs. This is because of the increase in respiration rate (the amount of breaths taken per minute) when a dog is sniffing and how hard the brain is working to process the information being sent to it from the nose. To give you an idea of just how tiring scent work can be for dogs, let’s think of it in terms of reps per minute:
- At rest: 15 reps
- On a lead walk: 30 reps
- Off lead, running, agility work: 60 reps
- High frequency sniffing (inhaling and exhaling at the same time: 140-200 reps
This means that half an hour of scent work is the equivalent to a 1-2 hour run for our dogs!
As a trainer, I often work with owners to help them understand their dogs’ primary sense and how it can be used to enrich their lives, drain their energy and even reduce reactivity. If you’d like to find out more about how to work your dog’s nose, then click here to drop me a message.
