Your Dog’s Superpowers: 7 Scientific Facts

We think we know everything about dogs, because they are among us, always there, live in our homes and sometimes even sleep in our beds. We even naively believe that we know what they think better than they do. In fact, everything is exactly the opposite.

At the conference, Royal Canin In Paris, zoologist and best-selling author of Inside the Dog Alexandra Horowitz shared 7 facts about dogs that surprised us. Perhaps they will make you look at your pet in a completely different way.

1. Your dog doesn’t feel guilty.

The so-called “guilty look” of the dog – this posture is well known to all of us: the head is lowered, the ears are laid back, the tail is also lowered, and the dog wags it close to the ground. We believe that they behave this way when they do something bad and feel guilty about it. A lot of research has shown that this is not the case. This is just an acquired response to the owner’s actions when he is angry.

2. A dog wags its tail, but that doesn’t mean it’s happy to see you.

We all know that if a dog wags its tail, it is calm and contented. But if you take a closer look at tail movements, you can also learn something about the dog’s brain: the fact is that dogs wag their tails asymmetrically. When they see the owners, they wag more to the right, and when they meet strangers or dogs, they turn to the left. Watching how they do it, we look into their brain – and, in particular, we can find out who is theirs for them and who is a stranger.

3. Dogs of different breeds see the world differently.

In dogs with an elongated muzzle, such as retrievers, most of the retinal cells are concentrated in a horizontal line across the eye. Flat-faced dogs, such as pugs, have the most cells in the center of the eye, where they form a rounded cluster, just like in humans. And this directly affects the differences in behavior patterns.

Retrievers are much more prone to movement: they can better follow a running rabbit or tennis ball. Pugs are very difficult to get to bring the ball. But they can sit on the owner’s lap for a long time and faithfully look him in the face.

4. Dogs have two noses. The second is needed to smell something that has no smell

We all know that dogs have delicate senses, right? But how subtle? Humans have about 5 million sensory olfactory cells, while dogs have between 200 million and a billion. They also have a so-called “second nose”. It is located above the oral cavity – the vomeronasal organ, or Jacobson’s organ. It captures molecules of substances that are odorless, but also carry a lot of information: these are pheromones and hormones. They also carry information about the individuality of a person or animal – this is a kind of chemical “personal signature”. It is very likely that dogs can smell fear through these substances, and maybe also joy or sadness.

5. A dog can inhale 5-7 times per second

Try it, is it easy to repeat? For us, this will end in hyperventilation! On average, a person takes two breaths in 3 seconds, which means that, compared with dogs, we smell a somewhat “outdated” picture of the world. People both inhale and exhale air in the same way: through the nasal cavity, and if we want to get rid of the sensation of any smell, then we “exhale” it. Dogs do not want to get rid of odors, so they have a special “secret way” to exhale: through the side cutouts of the nostrils. Thus, they are actually able to inhale and exhale at the same time.

6. Dogs can “see” the past and the future

Even after you have left the premises, the dog will know that you were there. The man leaves, but his scent remains. Analyzing smells, dogs get the concept of time. Old smells are not felt as strong as new ones. So dogs can actually learn about what happened in the past just by sniffing the ground under their feet. They can also “predict the future”: for example, when the door opens, the wind brings our scent through it, before we have entered yet. Smell precedes us, and dogs smell it.

Recent studies have shown that dog owners sometimes don’t give their pets the opportunity to train their sense of smell. Therefore, dogs often lose their sense, stop using it. This affects the quality of life of animals. After all, if the sense of smell for them is the main way of interacting with the world, then, falling out of the sphere of such interaction, they are likened to a person who loses his sight and, even turning to the window, cannot see the beautiful sunset behind it.

7 Dogs Can Smell Cancer In The Early Stages

Tracking dogs can tell which direction a wanted person has gone from five tracks. And they understand this by the concentration of odorous substances over the first and over the last trace: over the fifth trace, the concentration will be slightly higher than over the first. Dogs used to search for explosives can recognize one picogram—a trillionth of a gram—of TNT or other explosives. One fox terrier was able to recognize the smell of acids in human sweat at a concentration of one milligram per 100 million cubic meters.

Now dogs help to search not only for explosives, but also for populations of wild animals. Some are even capable of diagnosing cancer in the early stages, although other technological methods for this do not yet exist. Researchers are now working to teach a dog to tell its owner that it has smelled an illness so that a person can see a doctor more quickly.