Do You Smell What I Smell?

No?

I can’t believe it. The world is my smell feast.

Mom was telling me about dog’s noses. Of course, I know about smelling, and cute dog noses, but she learned some facts. Human’s like facts. We dogs like to smell.

Okay, here’s the story:

One drug-sniffing dog found 35 pounds of marijuana submerged in gasoline within a gas tank. Another dog insisted that there was melanoma on a person’s skin after the doctor declared the person cancer-free. Guess what a biopsy confirmed. Dog right, doctor wrong.

How do we do it?

While you, dear humans, can smell a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of coffee, we dogs—that’s me—can detect a spoonful of sugar in water the size of two Olympic sized swimming pools.

To put it another way if you delightful, wonderful, but smelling impaired humans can see one third of a mile, we darling stupendous dogs could see three thousand miles. It’s an analogy, we can’t see that far, actually our eye-sight isn’t as good as yours, it’s the smelling I’m talking about.

Researchers, that’s those smart humans who like facts, say that a dog’s smelling ability is 10,000 to 100,000 times better than a human’s. Gosh you poor humans, how do you function in the world? We dogs smell in each nostril independently, and move our heads back and forth to tell which direction the scent is coming from.  And I heard that humans can’t wiggle each nostril independently. Dog’s can.


Mom is surprised that I can’t find a hotel room we left a few minutes earlier. Maybe it’s because I didn’t know she wanted me to find it. I know a bloodhound would have no trouble. He can follow footprints. Now, how many molecules fall off the bottom of a shoe?  And to follow a specific shoe scent when the ground is littered with other smells, what a feat. A bloodhound’s big floppy ears help him, too, they fan odors up into his nose.

When you humans exhale, air goes out the same way it came in. With dogs it goes out the slits in the sides of the nose, and that helps usher in new scent. Also a part of inhaled air is shuttled up into special smelling glands that help us identify molecules, while another portion of the air goes directly into the lungs.

That way we can smell continuously.

No wonder my dear dog friend Gabe fainted when sprayed in the face by a skunk.

Talk about overwhelm.