Dog owners’ ability to identify their pet’s scent is not to be sniffed at
A DOG’S nose is famously sensitive, able to sniff out a distant cat, detect when a box of snacks has been opened and even able to tell when its owner has been around a different pet.
But new research suggests owners, too, have a keen sense of smell and are able to tell which dog is their own from scent alone.
Researchers from the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague recruited 53 dog owners for a study and used a sterile gauze pad to soak up their pet’s body odour before putting it in an airtight sterile glass jar.
Seventeen of the owners had two dogs, and the rest had one pet. Those with more than one dog took part in the experiment twice, once for each dog.
Each person was taken into a room with six identical jars and asked to smell all of them independently. Inside one was the pad which had soaked up the scent of their own pet while the other five were from other dogs in the study.
Male owners performed better than women, with men identifying their dog correctly nine times out of 10.
Women, however, only managed to identify their dog 65 per cent of the time, with more than one third getting it wrong.
Owners who kept their dogs outside also performed better than if their dogs lived indoors full-time, the researchers found.
This, they suggest, may be because dogs that are inside all the time trigger “sensory adaptation”, where the prolonged
exposure makes the person’s nose numb to the wet dog smell around them.
“Participants who fed their dog dry dog food also had a significantly higher rate of success than did owners who fed their dogs raw meat,” the researchers write in their study, published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“The frequency at which the dogs were bathed had a significant effect on the owners’ ability to identify their dogs.
“Owners who bathed their dogs frequently were less likely to correctly identify their scent.”
The finding that men are better at identifying their dog from smell alone was surprising, the authors say, because previous research has shown women have a superior sense of smell.
The researchers also say their findings indicate that the older the owner was, the less likely they were to recognise their dog, likely due to a deterioration in their sense of smell.
“These results clearly show that human olfactory sense is not as poor as previously thought, and that humans are able to identify not only their conspecifics [members of the same species] but also other mammals,” the researchers conclude.