Your Havanese's Sense of Smell

Okay Wasabi - where are you hiding Maggie? I know I can smell her and thanks to the rain, it's a fading memory.

Yesterday Maggie came to visit and I was stuck in the house. Well, Maggie is almost in season. I know it as I smelt it even though mom didn't let me go outside till she was long gone. I was already reacting before I was let out.

A dog's sense of smell is rather acute. Remember that humans when you put on that perfume. We like that freshly bathed smell. We react rather silly but Mags hadn't had a bath. It was something else.

Mom had to throw me in the pool to calm me down. I guess that was her version of the cold shower. It worked. It probably took some of those smells off my nose.

A dog can sniff out all sorts of smells that human noses miss. It's why it's so hard to get out accidents from those carpets.

We can train them for jobs such as tracking, rescue, seizure assistance or drug and bomb detection and to detect a wide variety of specific scents, such as drugs, fruits or the feces of particular animals.

Dogs that make a living by sniffing are trained to alert their handlers to the presence of these things by pawing, barking, or in the case of something dangerous, sitting quietly. They are trained by the promise of a favorite toy or play time each time they successfully sniff out the target scent.

How does a dog get the neighborhood news - often from smelling all sorts of things from a walk from a fire hydrant to a pole, to the ground - through its nose! Of all a dog's senses, its sense of smell is the most highly developed. Dogs have about 25 times more olfactory (smell) receptors than humans do. These receptors occur in special sniffing cells deep in a dog's snout and are what allow a dog to "out-smell" humans.

Dogs can sense odors at concentrations nearly 100 million times lower than humans can. They can detect one drop of blood in five quarts of water! Sniffing the bare sidewalk may seem crazy, but it yields a wealth of information to your dog, whether it's the scent of the poodle next door or a whiff of the bacon sandwich someone dropped last week.

When a dog breathes normally, air doesn't pass directly over the smell receptors. But when the dog takes a deep sniff, the air travels all the way to the smell receptors, near the back of the dog's snout. So for a dog, sniffing is a big part of smelling.

Next time you are wondering why your dog is sniffing that pole out front, realize they are simply reading the latest news.

Don't you wish you could smell like this? Well, then again - maybe not!

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