Can we smell dog pheromones? A Step-by-Step Guide

Clubs Offering:

  • A dog’s sense of smell is 10,000 times greater than ours
  • The scent-drive curiosity of dogs is about gathering information and saying hello
  • Some human crotches interest dogs more than others — humans who have recently had sexual intercourse, are menstruating, or have recently given birth

Dogs aren’t well-versed in the world of human boundaries, especially when it comes to using their nose. They often greet a new dog with a quick sniff of a rear end, so that often extends to how they greet a new human. Dogs will shove their noses into a human’s crotch, owner or guest, with no hesitation. While the invasive sniffing can be embarrassing, especially if your dog does it to a visitor, it’s their way of saying hello and learning about someone.

A dog’s nose is a powerful tool. Dogs have up to 300 million scent sensors in their noses, compared to humans who only have 6 million. This means that their sense of smell is 10,000 times greater than ours. According to an analogy by Michael T. Nappier, DVM, DABVP, of the Virginia Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, dogs can “detect the equivalent of a 1/2 a teaspoon of sugar in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.”

Dogs even have a special organ specifically dedicated to processing smells called Jacobson’s organ, or the vomeronasal organ. The organ, located above the roof of the mouth, plays an important role in how a dog interprets smell. It is connected to the scent-dedicated part of the dog’s brain, which is about 40 times larger than that of a human. This is why dogs are used to sniff out drugs, bombs, cancer, insulin levels, bed bugs, and more.

What Can a Dog Sense From Smelling Your Crotch?

Some human crotches are more likely to attract a dog’s curious nose:

  • Those who have recently had sexual intercourse
  • Those who are menstruating
  • Those who have recently given birth
  • All of these will pique a dog’s interest. This is because those people are excreting a higher level of pheromones. So even when a dog is familiar with their owner, if that owner is menstruating or just had a baby, they are letting off a different smell and the dog wants to know why. This may also be why dogs often steal underwear since the undergarment carries an owner’s scent.

    A dog’s ability to smell pheromones means they may be able to tell when a woman is ovulating. In his book, How Dogs Think, Stanley Coren, PhD., DSc., FRSC writes about how Australian Shepherds were trained to sniff out cows that had just ovulated. This method, which is reportedly easier than other ways to predict ovulation in livestock, has helped ranchers breed cows during their short breeding window. While it is not definitively proven that dogs can detect ovulation in humans, they can at least sense changes in their owners. A dog’s ability to detect ovulation may also extend to their ability to sniff out ovarian cancer.

    Dogs are led by scents – thats their dominant sense and for good reason. Dogs smell about 100,000 times better than humans do, and with about 25 times more smell receptors and a 40 times larger olfactory complex, it makes sense that they do. The blunt thing about people and dogs is that we all give off certain scents.

    Dogs may even treat you like a canine when it comes to understanding you. For dogs, sniffing is the dominant sense, and reading scents is much like reading a written status report about the target of its sniffing. So, your dog smelling and investigating your scent is a way for them to gather information about you, your well-being, and other driving factors.

    What does that mean? Well, think about it this way. If we were to dilute an ounce of blood into 20 Olympic-sized pools, your dog would be able to smell that drop of blood. Amazing, right? So, it makes sense that with their intense sniffing abilities, theyd be led by scents.

    Dogs treat humans like canines, right? Have you ever seen how two dogs greet each other? Were sure you have, and were sure youve tried to get your doggo to stop sniffing at the other dogs butt in public. Thats just dog behavior though, and they garner a certain amount of information about other canines by giving them a big ol sniff. Its the same for people. Your dog is simply looking for information about you!

    Ensure that when your pup does sniff in the wrong spots, theyre able to recognize that you consider it wrong and dont approve of this actions. Do this with a firm, verbal “no, or send them to their cage for 5-10 minutes following the unwanted action. When they do greet people correctly, ensure they know it! Give them love, attention, and of course, treats!

    Why do Dogs Sniff your Private Parts or your Crotch? Discover the reason WHY? || Monkoodog

    Has your dog ever given you a thorough once over after you’ve returned home smelling of another dog? Are you unwittingly wearing certain fragrances that repel dogs? (More about that later.) Scientists say dogs can smell 10,000 to 100,000 times more acutely than us. Given this, they most certainly care what we smell like—and they can tell a whole lot by our scent.

    James Walker, former director of the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, and colleagues came up with that mind-boggling estimate during a rigorous study of canine olfaction. “Lets suppose theyre just 10,000 times better, he told PBS. “If you make the analogy to vision, what you and I can see at a third of a mile, a dog could see more than 3,000 miles away and still see as well,”

    “Our dogs can smell us like a book,” says Alexandra Horowitz, founder of Barnard College’s Dog Cognition Lab, and author of Our Dogs, Ourselves. A research scientist in the field of dog cognition, she is also the author of two other books about dogs, including the bestseller Inside of a Dog.

    “When I brought dogs and people into my lab, I started to examine the relationship with dogs and humans,” Alexandra says. I am sure you could tell me about your dog’s personality, emotions, and desires, she says—and if your dog could talk, he could tell me about yours.

    Researchers have shown that dogs can determine a person’s mood by smell alone (though they also get cues from our body language). And dogs definitely respond to the way people smell, especially those they care about, say experts such as human neuroscientist Gregory Berns.

    “What the dog sees and knows comes through his nose, and the information that every dog—the tracking dog, of course, but also the dog lying next to you, snoring, on the couch—has about the world based on smell is unthinkably rich. It is rich in a way we humans once knew about, once acted on, but have since neglected, Alexandra says. In Our Dogs, Ourselves, Alexandra says that each day dogs perform surprising and sometimes alarming feats of olfactory perception and they can teach us to relearn some of our long-lost olfactory skills.

    “Dogs notice a change in body chemistry when you are sick, but humans cannot isolate a particular odour—although science is trying to do so,” Alexandra continues. “Humans were more familiar with body chemistry before science got advanced and before dogs were used to detect illness. For instance, doctors said a person with TB smelled like brown bread.” (Dogs can identify smell molecules in the range of parts per trillion, right on the limits of what even modern science can detect even if we know what we are looking for.) “All sorts of diseases are detectable by smell but having a doctor smell you isn’t as popular as a dog, so we moved away from that diagnostic method,” says Alexandra, laughing. “I believe that dogs do care what you smell like.”

    “We can wash our bedding but I think our dogs prefer their bed or your bed unwashed—of course not to the point when it is growing spores. But what we think of as clean odour may not be desirable,” Alexandra continues. “My dog would sleep on my shoe, for example. People talk about their dogs chewing clothes—mine chewed underwear. They are not chewing new clothes: You have left your odour on them and that is desirable.” Although Alexandra isn’t suggesting that we curtail washing ourselves and our clothes, she does make a point—dogs prefer our familiar odours to sanitized ones.

    Most dogs know (and abhor) that sterilized smell of the vet’s office. Mine can tell when someone has been to the hospital—I believe it reminds them of the veterinarian clinic—and it makes them really stressed out.

    Researchers have shown that dogs can determine a person’s mood by smell alone. Human emotions manifest physically in pheromones, or chemosignals, that are emitted by the body, and dogs can decipher those changes. This is thanks in part to an organ we dont possess: the vomeronasal organ, also known as Jacobsons organ. It’s located in the bottom of a dogs nasal passage and picks up pheromones.

    Who hasn’t heard the expression, “dogs can smell fear?” When you’re anxious, you start to perspire. You and other people may not notice, but a dog will, because dogs can have up to 300 million olfactory receptors in its nose, whereas the average human only has about six million.

    MIT professor Andreas Mershin is an expert authority on artificial olfaction. He is working on developing an app that would create the ability for a smart phone to sniff out changes in a person’s health—“Your cell phone needs to have a nose to save your life,” says Andreas. But he admits that a dog’s sense of smell still out-performs any amount of programming code to date. “Dogs so far can detect any cancer [they have been asked to detect] that has been tried as well as malaria and Parkinson’s Disease,” he says. “They smell a recipe of molecules while we are just learning how olfaction works.”

    Take the case of George, a 43-pound Standard Schnauzer who was trained to detect melanoma. In one case, George indicated a mole that had previously been examined by three different doctors and biopsied twice. Doctors finally excised the mole and sent it to the pathology laboratory. A cell-by-cell analysis showed the patient had Stage II melanoma. George saved the patient’s life.

    Andreas theorizes that affection plays a role in dogs caring what we smell like. “When dogs are trained to detect drugs, the training paradigm is the slave-master relationship: the dog is subservient; the motivation is to achieve love,” he says. “On the other hand, I work with Claire Guest, CEO of Medical Detection Dogs. She trains—not enslaves—dogs to detect cancer and part of the reason they do so well is because they are having fun and they care about you. Maybe you won’t be so much fun if you are sick, so they are doing it for themselves and for you.”

    If you’ve ever thought your dog could tell when you were unwell, you weren’t wrong. “If a person is infected with a virus or bacteria, they will smell different,” says Alexandra. “Dogs are preternaturally sensitive to changes in their people.”