When humans want to figure out what’s going on around them, their first instinct is to look around and see. Sight is the sense most humans rely on to understand the world. But dogs use a different sense – they follow their noses! Dogs have an incredibly powerful sense of smell. Depending on the breed
When humans want to figure out what’s going on around them, their first instinct is to look around and see. Sight is the sense most humans rely on to understand the world. But dogs use a different sense – they follow their noses!
Dogs have an incredibly powerful sense of smell. Depending on the breed of dog, it can be between 1,000 and 10,000 times stronger than a human’s. To understand why, you have to take a look deep inside our noses.
When you breathe in, air passes over crinkly, bony plates that contain your scent receptors – cells that can pick up smells in the air and send messages about what they smell to your brain. It’s all folded up, but if you could unfold a human’s scent organ, it would be about the size of an adult’s thumbnail. A dog’s, on the other hand, is about the size of a sheet of paper! Humans can fit about 5 million scent receptors onto their scent organ, but dogs can fit far more. Dachsunds have 125 million scent receptors, and bloodhounds can have as many as 300 million! Even our brains are different. The part of the brain used for figuring out smells is 40 times bigger in a dog than it is in a human!
A dog’s nose is obviously important for smelling, but it has another special property. Just like every human has fingerprints that belong to them and nobody else, dogs have completely unique nose prints! The bumps and ridges and dimples on a dog’s nose form a unique pattern that vets and kennels can use to tell one dog from the millions of others on the planet.
Now that’s a useful nose!
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