Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Dogs' Sense of Smell

In the behavioral realm it is critically important that we have at least an insight into how dogs perceive things because most of mammal behavior is a response to what we perceive. I usually say that dogs can hear your hair grow and smell you change your mind!

Dogs’ sense of smell is their most highly developed sense. You’ll hear stories about how dogs can smell a thousand times better than we can or ten thousand times—that’s all just guess. Dogs’ sense of smell is so good that we can’t even measure it!

Dog’s sense of smell can only be approximated. Of the machines that measure how things smell, the most sensitive is the gas chromatograph. It is so sensitive that it can detect one part per trillion in a test atmosphere.

A dog can smell from 40 feet away what a chromatograph cannot detect at the source! That is inconceivable to us!

The medical community has been researching the utility of the dog’s incredible sense of smell in diagnosing certain medical conditions. Dogs are already being used to sense low blood sugar and to warn of epileptic seizures. Evidence also shows that dogs can differentiate between healthy skin cells and cancerous ones. It is theorized that certain disease conditions cause subtle chemical changes in the body or changes in metabolism, which dogs can detect through smell.

We all hear of dogs being used to track criminals or victims and search for drugs or explosives. How about dogs tracking dogs? Dr. Keith Richter, a veterinarian in San Diego, tells this story:

“One of the doctors at our animal hospital had a dog
that ran away. There’s a search and rescue dog in
the state of Washington that specializes in finding lost
pets. We flew that dog, who has over 4,000 “finds”,
down to San Diego. He’s a little 20-pound mutt—
a gifted dog. He went out and three miles later, he
found the dog. It was just incredible!”

by Dennis Fetko, Ph.D.
http://www.drdogsbehaviorsolutions.com/

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