Dog Senses

Smell
Smell is the dog’s most prominent sense and the one that is the most different from ours. It has been estimated that a dog’s sense of smell is 100,000 times more powerful than a humans. Scientists think that humans have about 40 million olfactory receptors, versus 2 billion for your dog.

Hearing
Dogs are able to hear sounds which we cannot. Dogs can hear at four times the distance humans can. Their ears are also better designed to gather more of the available sound waves – they have 15 different muscles that move their ears in all directions. Plus they can move one ear at a time, independently of the other, to absorb even more information.

Touch
Dogs vary widely in their reaction to touch. Some dogs like a good, deep scratch, while others prefer a soft petting. Dogs which liked being touched on the chest or behind the ears are easy to reward for a good response to a cue. Many dogs do not like to be touched on their paws.

Sight
Because of the position of the eyes on the head, dogs have a wider angle of view than we so. However, the field of vision from each eye does not overlap as much as ours so that less of what they see is in focus. This means that they can see further around them but can not always identify what they see. Dogs are very good at noticing movement. This is one of the reasons why they respond well to training by hand signals as well as voice commands. It was once thought that dogs were “color-blind” – only able to see shades of black and white with some grey, but scientific studies have found that’s not true. Dogs are great at detecting motion – that’s one reason they can detect a cat up a tree at a much greater distance than you can! And their night vision is typically better than ours – dogs have an additional reflective layer in the eye called the tapetum lucidum, which reflects light back into the receptor cells of the eye, which not only increases their night vision, but gives the appearance of eyes glowing in the dark.

Taste
Just as with humans, taste is closely linked to the sense of smell. Every dog has different taste preferences.

Memory Dogs have very good memories – if they didn’t it would not be possible to train them as easily as we can. Unfortunately they will also remember things that we would prefer them to forget.