More Evidence That Dogs ‘See’ the World With Their Powerful Noses

[Guest Nicole]

Dogs are equipped with a powerful sense of smell, but scientists haven’t been sure if our canine companions are capable of linking an aroma or scent to a physical object. New research suggests this is very much the case, and that dogs form a mental picture in their mind of the target when they’re tracking down a scent.

For humans, vision is an incredibly important sense. Dogs, by contrast, rely more on their senses of smell and hearing to gather information about the world around them. Their vision actually sucks, having a visual acuity that’s four to eight times worse than ours. What’s more, their line of sight is just a few inches off the ground (depending on the breed), so they’ve got a very truncated view of the horizon. And contrary to popular myth, dogs don’t see the world in black and white; they are red-green colorblind, meaning they can’t distinguish between objects that are green, yellow, and red.

But what they lack in visual acuity is compensated for by their powerful ears and noses. Dogs have excellent hearing, picking up frequencies between 40 Hz to 60 kHz, whereas humans hear between 12 Hz to 20 kHz. Canines have over 18 muscles in each ear, allowing them to independently orient their ears like radar dishes; dogs can hear sounds that are four times further away compared to humans.

And then there’s their remarkable sense of smell. Dogs have highly a specialized organ in their noses equipped with 300 million olfactory receptors. They’ve also got an olfactory organ in their brain that’s 40 times bigger than ours. The end result is a sense of smell that’s 10,000 times more powerful than humans. “If you make the analogy to vision, what you and I can see at a third of a mile, a dog could see more than 3,000 miles away and still see as well,” Florida State University scientist James Walker told Nova a few years back.

Full article: https://gizmodo.com/more-evidence-that-dogs-see-the-world-with-their-powe-1823557475?mc_cid=cad12f8f43&mc_eid=bca088da12