Let your dog sniff!!

Let them sniff!!  

The importance of the olfactory system

Dogs need information, just like we do. We get ours in a number of ways; the internet, television, radio, newspapers. Dogs get nearly all their information through their noses. I see so many dogs who are happily checking their ‘pee-mail’ being hurried along on their walks “Let’s go, we haven’t got time for you to sniff every lamppost Fido!”

Why!?

Is it your walk or theirs? I understand that sometimes we have to be somewhere and life is a bit hurried but if your dog likes to sniff, then maybe reduce the distance and area you think you should be covering and let them spend their allotted walking time doing what they enjoy, not perhaps what you think they should be doing!!

Sniffing provides them with all the news and gossip of the area, which dogs have been there and with whom, which cats have dared meander through like they own the place plus all the other wildlife and human traffic that has passed by in the past few hours. Think how much information there is there! That lamppost may look like an ordinary lamppost to you or I but Fido can tell so much more including the gender of the dog, when they were there, what their diet contains and their mood all from a few sniffs. No wonder sometimes Fido is reluctant to leave an area they are sniffing! It’s like beginning a gripping drama only to be interrupted and you don’t get to finish watching it!

The dogs nose is an amazing tool. A dog can detect one teaspoon of sugar in an Olympic size pool of water! Just think about that! No wonder dogs are used and trained to detect all manner of things from drugs and guns, to locating lost or hurt people and detecting illnesses such as cancer as well as performing the amazing task of alerting people ahead of seizures. 

The best reason to let your dog sniff??? Sniffing produces endorphins which are feel-good hormones that help calm your dog. A calm dog is a happy dog. There are many simple things dog guardians can do to encourage this amazing and fulfilling past time. You could try scatter feeding their dinner outside or on a walk, using a snuffle mat for dry treats to hiding tasty treats around the house and garden and making a game of searching them out. You can help but try to let your dog do the majority of the leg (or in this case nose!) work!

Stop and smell the flowers! 

This incredible nose contains up to 300 million olfactory receptors in comparison to the mere 6 million that us humans possess!! The part of their brain devoted to analysing smells is 40 times greater than ours! If we equate it to a visual analogy, human’s most powerful sense, what a human could see at a distance of 0.5 kilometre a dog could see clearly at nearly 5000 kilometres!

Is it rude or just info?

Rear end sniffing of other dogs (or humans!) is not your dog trying to embarrass you or make you feel awkward! It is simply the canine version of a handshake!

We use our vision to recognise the faces of people we have met previously but dogs use their most powerful sense to check if you are familiar to them or not. This is their sense of smell and unfortunately for us slightly more sensitive humans, the area where dogs get the most information is the crotch area, due to the glands positioned there! In dogs these glands are located all over the body but in humans they are concentrated in the crotch and armpits, but one is much more easily accessible for dogs! Sniffing another dog’s rear end is just them gaining all the information we might by asking and getting a reply to “hey, how are you doing?!”

#letthemsniff #dog