DOG - SENSE OF TOUCH

Touch is the first sense the dog develops and remains a powerfully important sense throughout his life. Mothers begin touching newborn puppies almost immediately after birth by licking and nuzzling. Touch-sensitive hairs called vibrissae, which are capable of sensing airflow, develop above the eyes, on the muzzle, and below the jaws. The entire body, including the paws, is covered with touch-sensitive nerve endings. The physical sense of touch is very sensitive, although dogs do have a high threshold of pain. The most sensitive nerve endings are along the spine and towards the tail, and dogs show great enthusiasm when patted or extended rolls and slides on the grass.
The dogs' senses leads to some surprising behaviors.

# A dog knows when you're going out
# It can sleep next to the TV when it's on but you can wake it with only crumpling paper
# Some dogs like to watch their surroundings from a high place even though it's sense of sight isn't very developed
# A dog can distinguish the family cars' sound
# A dog can differentiate the touch of family members
A dog alerts the family member at home, even if you are on the other corner of the street

DOG'S SENSE OF HEARING

As dog's ears are able to move in different directions, it is easier for dogs to pinpoint the exact location of a sound's origin. The frequencies that dogs can perceive and hear are almost twice that of humans and they can pick up and distinguish sounds at roughly 4 times the range of humans. Not only do dogs hear the sounds but also perceive the height and depth of the sounds that they hear. Dogs also have the ability to hear ultra high frequencies that humans cannot and many professional doghandlers and trainers use this ability to their advantage by teaching them and training them to respond to different commands given on whistles that produce ultra high frequency sounds. Dogs are also very sensitive to complete silence also taking this as a warning sign of impending threat. This sensitivity to silence is found in almost all wild animals.
Humans can hear sounds approximately within the frequencies of 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. Anything below 20 Hz, typically cannot be heard although it can be felt. This can be experienced to when you feel the bass of a song. Likewise humans normally cannot hear any sounds above the frequency of 20,000 Hz. Although human hearing is limited to this frequency range, many animals have a wider range of sounds of which they can hear, like dogs for example.

The frequency range of dog hearing is approximately 40 Hz to 60,000 Hz, of course depending on the breed of dog as well as its age. Like humans, dogs can begin to go deaf as they become older. In some breeds of dogs it is natural for them to go completely deaf in their old age.

YOUR DOG'S SMELL SENSE

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.