Feb 19 2009
The Nose Knows, and Other Clichés
If you close your eyes right now and breathe through your nose, what do you smell? Cigarette smoke? Your coffee cooling on the desk? The air freshener that spritzes every nine minutes? How much of it did you notice before you thought about it?
A dog’s nose is calculated to be 100,000 times as sensitive as a human’s, or sometimes more. That means that if you need one gram of a substance present to smell it, at the same distance the dog needs 1/100,000 as much. How much scent is badgering away at your dog as he lies at your feet, then, with your coffee filling his nose? He can also smell you and your mood, the cat in the next room, the vapors wafting up from the carpet, and thousands of other things. The trick is not teaching the dog to smell things out; the trick is teaching him which of those thousand thousand odors you care to know about. If you’re willing to listen to your dog – after all, he’s the expert – he can show you all sorts of interesting things about the world.
I suggested yesterday that some of the information in this blog could be used on other animals. Cats, rats, and horses all have noses one-fifth to one-half as good as a dog’s. A mere one-fifth? What’s the point? It’s still 20,000 times better than ours. The rat can search objects out in spaces even a small dog would have trouble exploring, and do it quickly. A horse can put his nose higher to catch air currents than the biggest dog. Your training sessions would be calibrated accordingly, but you can still learn about a world largely closed to us by watching your animal’s nose.
My chief scent education has come from my shepherd Sunny. Watching the tip of her nose, I have learned of airflows contrary to the overall wind. I have learned that scent can be drawn sideways through tall grass by a passing animal in a pattern rather like that left when you draw a knife through marble cake batter. I learned that for all practical purposes, a dog can see backward in time with her nose. Most of all, though, I learned humility. We humans like to think we know everything.
Very good information. I wasn’ta ware that dog’s sense of smell was so much better than even a cat. I do know they can always smell their dinner before I get it ready.
Cats have a pretty good sense of smell — the trick is to get them to tell you about it! They’re considerably less communicative, unless of course the subject is food. Ideally, food for them.