The Nose Knows!

Most everyone knows that dogs have been using their keen sense of smell to hunt down drugs, bombs, missing people, and now even cancer. But did you know that dogs are also being used to sniff out bedbugs in apartments and hotels and pirated DVDs and CDs? Now, many dogs have been put to work to sniff out these new items. Read all about it HERE.

James Estrin/The New York Times

Jada, with her owner, Carl Massicott, seeking out bedbugs for pay.

I wondered how they were able to do this for a very long time. I somewhat finally understood the process, when I began working at Kindred Spirits last year. This is how it was explained to me. When a dog catches a scent or smells something specific, such as a drug or food, he doesn't smell the combination of ingredients or substances. A dog can smell each ingredient that makes up the whole. For example if you had a bowl of creamed corn, a dog could smell the corn, salt, pepper, butter, and any other ingredient individually.

Here is another interesting fact about how acute a dog's sense of smell really is:

Smell is a dog's sharpest sense. Next time a dog sniffs at you, think about this: just by smelling, a dog can tell where you have been and what you have been doing, what you have eaten, and even whether you are not feeling well. (Perhaps it's a good thing that dogs can't talk.) The dog is using its nose the way you use your eyes to recognize people and figure out something about them. You know your little sister just came home from school because you see that she has her B backpack on; she had peanut butter and jelly for lunch because it is all over her shirt; and she looks might have a cold. A dog's nose enough to detect the scents your little sister picked up at school, the pb and j, and even the chemical changes that take place in her body if she is ill.

Here's another cool fact:

A classic study of dogs’ olfactory capabilities showed that dogs could reliably discriminate members of a single family, including siblings and even fraternal twins.1 A trained dog can retrieve the one stick handled by his owner from a pile of 20 or 30. In other tests, dogs trained to detect a certain odor were able to identify the scent even when presented with a complex blend of scents.

"So, just follow the nose. It always knows!!"