Signs Your Dog Senses Your Hormones
You might not have known it before, but lots of animals are able to detect when your hormones are changing or balancing out – and that includes your pup. Your dog, with his or her keen sense of smell, is able to detect menstruation and other changes by both odor and hormonal levels.
Sure, your dog probably doesnt fully understand what those things mean, but they do know that something different is going on than usual.
Your dog will probably let you know they can detect a difference by giving you a pretty obsessive dose of sniffing and licking. Thats right, you can expect your dog to get all up in your business – speaking of which, you can probably expect that your dog will get up close and personal with some of your hormonal zones, so keep a lookout for doggo snouts trying nose into places they dont belong.
Your dog also might try to give you extra comfort and love – they might nuzzle up with you, give you kisses, or just try to be closer to you than normal because theyre detecting a physiological and hormonal shift.
Here are a few signs your dog might be giving you to signal that he or she knows youre dealing with some hormonal shifts:
Your dog might be behaving in these ways as well:
Dogs have an extraordinary ability to track down people by smell, which is why they are used in missing person searches. “Trained search and rescue dogs can follow a scent from footstep to footstep, and can even catch scents in the air,” says Dan Morris from PetNPat. “This is invaluable to us in the task of locating those who are lost because we simply have nowhere near the same capabilities.” Some breeds of dogs are better than others at tracking people, but because of dogs’ olfactory abilities that have adapted over time to ensure their survival, their ability is always better than humans. Learn more fun facts about dogs that you may not have known.
It’s true! Cindy Otto, Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Working Dog Center, is currently training eight Labrador Retrievers to sniff out COVID-19. If the study is successful, dogs will be able to screen people for coronavirus in airports, hospitals, and other public gathering spots. While these dogs won’t serve as a replacement for tests, they can be used as a non-invasive alternative similar to how dogs are currently used to sniff for explosives in airports, yet we still have to go through security. Check out some other canine heroes who saved their owner’s life.
Dogs often understand our emotions better than we can. “When we have changes in our emotions, our hormones change as well (think of stress hormones like cortisol or adrenaline, or happy hormones like oxytocin),” says Jen Jones of Your Dog Advisor. “These hormones are detectable by dogs in our breath and in our sweat.” Since dogs are astoundingly in tune with our smells, and they can detect very minuscule changes to our hormone levels, letting them when we are happy, sad, stressed, or scared. Now, decipher your dog’s emotions with our guide to the noises they make.
“Scientists have confirmed that dogs can smell cancer in its early stages, specifically lung and breast cancer,” explains pet expert Peter Laskay. The cancerous tumor produces proteins that dogs can smell in urine. They can sense several types of cancer including lung cancer, bladder cancer, prostate cancer, and breast cancer. Dogs even help out in clinics during the early stages of diagnostics. See what your dog wishes you knew about them.
Bed bugs produce an odor from their scent glands that is only noticeable to humans in very large quantities like when you have an infestation. “Many new forms of pest control involve bed-bug sniffing dogs who, with their incredible noses, can detect this odor in its earliest stages,” explains Jones. “This helps rid homes of bed bugs before an infestation gets out of control. Speaking of gross things your dog likes to smell, don’t miss why your dog likes to sniff another dog’s butt.
Why do dogs “smell better” than humans?
Unlike humans, dogs have an additional olfactory tool that increases their ability to smell. Jacobsen’s organ (or the vomeronasal organ) is a special part of the dog’s olfactory apparatus located inside the nasal cavity and opens into the roof of the mouth behind the upper incisors. This amazing organ serves as a secondary olfactory system designed specifically for chemical communication. The nerves from Jacobsen’s organ lead directly to the brain and are different from the other nerves in the nose in that they do not respond to ordinary smells. In fact, these nerve cells respond to a range of substances that often have no odor at all. In other words, they work to detect “undetectable” odors.
Jacobsen’s organ communicates with the part of the brain that deals with mating. By identifying pheromones, it provides male and female dogs with the information they need to determine if a member of the opposite sex is available for breeding. It also enhances a newborn pup’s sense of smell so he can find his mother’s milk source, and allows a pup to distinguish his mother from other nursing dogs. With a quick sniff, a pup placed between two females will migrate to the mother that gave birth to him. Pups also have heat sensors in their noses that help them locate their mothers if they wander away.
The two separate parts of the dog’s odor detection system, the nose and Jacobsen’s organ, work together to provide delicate sensibilities that neither system could achieve alone. When the dog curls his lips and flares his nostrils, he opens up Jacobsen’s organ, increases the exposure of the nasal cavity to aromatic molecules and essentially becomes a remarkably efficient smelling machine.