Golden Retriever Can’t Quit Playing Hide and Seek with His Owners

“The dog’s sense of smell is so adept that a blind dog has much less difficulty adjusting to the loss of vision than a human does,” according to VCA Animal Hospitals.

Indeed, the abilities of a dog’s nose are so amazing! With more than 100 million sensory receptor sites in this animal’s nasal cavity — compared to 6 million in humans — a dog can smell 10,000 to 100,000 times better than us.

It’s the reason why we frequently see dogs in search and rescue missions and other critical tasks. Based on a Euronews article, dogs do 70% of search efforts in rescue missions and humans 30% of the undertaking. A dog’s survival instinct along with its powerful sense of smell helps it to accomplish its dangerous work.

Here are more fascinating facts about a dog’s nose:

1. The power of smell differs in dog breeds. Dogs with short noses, or brachycephalic breeds, such as Bulldogs, French Bulldogs, Boxers, Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Boston Terriers, Shih Tzus, Mastiffs, and Pugs, are less sensitive to odors compared to non-brachycephalic dogs.



2. Not all inhaled air goes through a dog’s lungs. Unlike people, whose inhaled air travels down our windpipes to our lungs, about 12% to 13% of a dog’s inhaled air gets separated via an upper pathway that goes straight to its olfactory epithelium. This is a thin layer of tissue that’s responsible for odor detection.
3. Dogs have a special vomeronasal organ that’s also called “Jacobson’s organ.” It is located inside its nasal cavity and opens into the roof of a dog’s mouth behind the upper incisors. This organ functions as a secondary olfactory system for chemical communication. According to VCA Hospitals, “The nerves from Jacobson’s organ lead directly to the brain and are different from the nerves in the olfactory tissue of the nose in that they do not respond to ordinary smells. In fact, these nerve cells respond to a range of substances that often have no odor at all. In other words, they work to detect ‘undetectable’ odors.”

   

4. Dogs are capable of “sniffing lateralization,” which is a phenomenon in which they sniff separately with each nostril. First, they use their right nostril in sniffing. Then, when smelling familiar or beneficial scents, they shift to their left nostril. But, when the scent is aversive or threatening, dogs use their right nostril. According to CareCredit, “This has to do with the processing pathways in the brain: The right hemisphere processes novel information, while the left hemisphere controls behavioral responses to familiar stimuli.”
5. Your dog can tell when you’re stressed out. Based on a study at Queen’s University Belfast in UK, a stressed person’s sweat and breath have volatile organic chemicals that dogs can detect. Moreover, dogs can also sniff certain diseases like cancer. They can also predict seizures and distinguish persons with low blood sugar by smelling.



6. And yes, your dog loves your scent! In a study conducted at Emory University, they put trained dogs in a functional MRI and used five scents to analyze their reactions: a familiar person, an unfamiliar person, a familiar dog, an unfamiliar dog, and the respective scent of each dog. The result? Only the scent of a familiar person activates the part of the dog’s brain that is connected to positive expectations and social rewards. This means our pet dogs link our scent to goodness.

In this video, this family is always having fun with their favorite game of hide and seek. But, of course, due to this Golden Retriever’s powerful sense of smell, she always plays the seeker. Well, it only takes seconds to find her fur parents wherever they hide. Ellie wishes they could hide better.

But maybe one of them should play seeker the next time around! Ellie is sure she can’t be discovered as quickly as she can find both of her fur parents!