Dr Fetcher
5 interesting facts about dogs’ senses
1. Just as no two fingerprints are the same, no two dog noses are the same. The arrangement of the folds and grooves creates a unique pattern on every four-legged favorite’s nose. This allows kennel clubs around the world to register nose prints… thus helping to find stolen or lost dogs. For now, the old method of inking the animal’s nose and then pressing it on a piece of paper is still more widespread. But! There is already a phone application that registers the main identification markers in seconds. It then identifies the dogs in the system with 95 percent accuracy.
2. The olfactory center of a dog’s brain is 40 times larger than that of a human. And their noses contain millions (some estimates put it at 300 million) of olfactory receptors. Thanks to these, our furry friends’ sense of smell is 10-100,000 times stronger than ours, humans. It’s no coincidence: our four-legged friends almost always help us find drugs, explosives, or even dead bodies… or rather, sniff them out. After all, it’s no surprise that in 2013, the United States Supreme Court ruled that evidence sniffed out by trained dogs is admissible in court.
3. No newborn puppy can survive without its mother. One of the main reasons for this is that all puppies are born deaf and blind. Since they continue to develop after birth, it takes about two weeks for their eyes to open… and for the puppies to start responding to noises. Until then, the puppies spend most of their time sleeping and eating.
4. Dogs’ hearing, like their sense of smell, is also impressive. Compared to us, they can perfectly hear sounds coming from four times further away. Furthermore, everything from the position of their ears to the muscles inside them helps them hear sounds that we (mere mortals) wouldn’t be able to hear even if we wanted to. The legendary Beatles even wrote a song for dogs inspired by this… if you’re interested in which of their songs our furry friends around the world enjoy, open the link below:
5. Despite their aforementioned superpowers, dogs have a very underdeveloped sense of taste. This can be explained by the low number of taste buds. While the average human has roughly 9,000 taste buds on their tongue, our furry friends only have 1,700. As a result, a rotting piece of food in the garbage can be just as appealing to a dog as a carefully prepared steak.
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