A dog's scent organ is about four times larger than a human's, and a dog's sense of smell is about 50-100 times more powerful than ours. Although all dogs have a powerful sense of smell, some breeds have a greater talent for sniffing e.g. Basset Hounds, Bloodhounds, and Beagles, which are considered 'scent hounds.' If you live with a scent hound, you know how difficult it is to get his mind focused on anything but odors.
A dog's brain is also specialized for identifying scents. The percentage of the dog's brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is actually 40 times larger than that of a human! It's been estimated that dogs can identify smells somewhere between 1,000 to 10,000 times better than nasally challenged humans can.
Its smell sense is so developed that it can detect the slightest environmental change. The dog can detect the change of character of other dogs or humans that surround them, just by detecting the slight increase or decrease of their hormonal levels and their sweat. This has nothing to do with a sixth sense: the dog can just detect certain signals that go unnoticed by humans.
Even so, tears of joy contain different substances than those of sadness or pain and dogs are able to tell the difference. The sense of smell of dogs enables them to follow the cent of a wild animal and locate it; track missing persons; search for people buried under decries or snow, follow the trace of a criminal or detect hidden drugs.
No comments:
Post a Comment