Smells That Repel

For your dog’s sake, skip the perfumes and air fresheners

As part of the meet and greet, your canine gives a new dog or person a good sniff. If all goes well, it could mean best friends for life. But if they get a whiff of something unpleasant, intimidating or confusing, they’ll follow their nose to a better aroma.

Smells most dogs don’t like include vinegar, citrus, rubbing alcohol, and mothballs. Some dogs turn their nose away from cayenne pepper, coffee grounds, pipe tobacco, and essential oils like lemon grass oil (not safe for dogs), citronella oil, peppermint oil, eucalyptus oil (not safe for dogs), and mustard oil.

Reader’s Digest suggests mixing orange peel with used coffee grounds to both repel dogs from your garden and fertilize the plants. (If your dog will eat literally anything, don’t try this; ingestion of caffeine can be life threatening to dogs and cats.) If you want to train your dog to stay off a piece of furniture and you have a citronella product that sprays on fabric, squirt a small amount on your finger. If your dog backs away, that’s a sure sign that it might work as a repellent. If she licks your fingers, try another kind of citrus. After walkies (we do sniff and stroll) notice what your house smells like when you come home. If you use citrus air freshener, maybe your fur baby would likely be much happier without it, or, at the very least, another lighter scent. Imagine how overwhelming and obnoxious artificial fragrances (perfumes and air fresheners) would be if you could smell tens of thousands of times more acutely, as your dog can.