Amazing Facts About Your Dog's Sense of Smell

The sense of smell is the most developed sense by the dog, in fact, at birth, it is the only sense that they have developed and it helps them to find the nipple of the mother. Since they are born deaf and blind. It is this great olfactory capacity so the dog is used to search for people, drug tracking, detection of explosives, etc. To give you an idea, a dog has between 150 million (the least) and 300 million (the most, like the hounds) of receptive cells of smell, when we humans have only 5 million. Incredibly true? But in addition to this, it should be noted that they have a large olfactory memory, reaching an area of ​​150 square centimeters, while in humans that area is 5 square centimeters.

That is, the dog is able to remember a person before by its smell and voice that by its appearance, unlike humans, we tend to remember more people visually.

Smell in dogs is 10,000 times more sensitive than their taste. It is thanks to an organ called Jacobson's organ that is located in the lower part of the olfactory mucosa and that communicates with the oral cavity, that the dog can extract smells from the air or from licked or ingested substances. How many times have you watched your dog lick the ground and notice how it makes a special shaking with the teeth? This behavior is carried out to extract information from the substance that has just licked, as well as the behavior of smelling the butt. Surely you wonder what that behavior comes from? Very simple: smelling the backside, dogs can know through the smell the sex of the other dog, his personality, age, race, etc. Although humans do not smell our butts, dogs are able to perceive through smell, how we feel: happy, sad, angry, etc.

Smell, in addition, has a very important function to perpetuate its species: its continuity depends on hormones released by females in heat called pheromones. With them, the females send olfactory signals that indicate to the male the predisposition of them to the mount.

Humans are taking advantage of this incredible olfactory ability of dogs, to train them in medicine, being able to detect diseases such as a rise in sugar in diabetics, an attack of epilepsy or different types of cancer.

Thanks to them, many lives are saved and we can never forget that.