It is difficult for humans to imagine the olfactory experiences of a domestic dog as they walk around the park with their human caregiver. We are as distanced from imagining what that feels like as the dog is in imagining what it’s like for a human to do calculus! They are different worlds.
And some people, some experts in fact, believe that dogs are 100 times better than humans at smell detection. Other experts have said that the figure could be as high as a million times better and some go far as to say that dogs are 100 million times better than humans in this respect.
Dr. Desmond Morris, who I rely upon a lot, has a better answer in my opinion. He says it depends upon the chemical substance that the dog and human are detecting. Dogs can’t detect flowers any better than humans but, for example, the substance butyric acid found in human sweat elicits an incredible response from dogs which is at least a one million times better than ours.
This is the dog’s awesome smell-detection ability. I mention one test in the Infographic. Another, is for six men to each pick up a pebble and throw it as far as they can. A dog is allowed to sniff the hand of one of the men. The dog then chases off to find the pebble thrown by that man and invariably succeeds.
The perspiration of human feet is particularly interesting to dogs. Bloodhounds can follow a trail for a hundred miles that is four days old. The smell of sweat from a human foot is so powerful that dogs can identify the feet of an individual person in areas where many other feet have trodden and where they’ve all worn shoes. It is extraordinary.
You might know that human identical twins have an identical body scent and therefore dogs cannot tell them apart. But where the twins are fraternal and have different body scent dogs can easily distinguish them by their body odour.
One of the most extraordinary detection successes of the dog for me, is when they walk around departure lounges at airports and smell money that’s been packed deeply in cellophane and behind the owner’s clothes in a suitcase. Money is nearly odourless to humans.
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