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It is not clear what role, if any, the domestication of dogs played in the development of these behaviours. It has been suggested that dogs’ striking emotional intelligence towards humans is a product of the thousands of years we have spent with them.
Dogs exposed to fear smells showed more signs of stress than those exposed to happy or neutral smells. They also had higher heart rates, and sought more reassurance from their owners and made less social contact with strangers.
“This adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that dogs are very sensitive to human attention,” says Kaminski.
“The role of the olfactory system has been largely underestimated, maybe because our own species is more focused on the visual system,” says D’Aniello. However, dogs’ sense of smell is far superior to ours.
What do dogs do when they know you’re scared?In some cases, they might respond with a ‘fight or flight’ reaction – which means they’ll either try to scare the threat away, or run away from it or find ways to avoid it. The ‘fight or flight’ instinct is a natural one, but sometimes it can cause dogs to overreact.
Like dogs, humans can also interpret body language and sense emotions in others. But can they smell things like dogs can? Maybe! Recent research has indicated that human sweat from anxiety smells different than sweat from exercise…and humans can smell the difference! Researchers believe that humans may be able to detect certain smells associated with anxiety and react with empathy as a result.
However, smelling sweat doesnt necessarily mean the same thing as smelling the emotion of fear. Experts believe that sensing fear may involve more than smells. Movements and actions, such as stiffening up or staring straight at dogs, can be seen and interpreted by dogs to lead to a conclusion that a particular person is afraid and therefore may present a threat.
But not all dogs are friendly. Most people have come across an aggressive dog at one time or another. When that happens, some people will tell you to remain calm and not to show any fear. Why? Because dogs can smell fear! If they smell fear on you, theyll become more aggressive and possibly attack.
Facing Fears | Cesar 911
There is a long-held belief that dogs can literally “smell fear” and in some cases will react aggressively, leading to the above advice to not show fear to a dog.
This is actually good advice — but not for the reason you may think. Dogs often react to the emotions they pick up from their humans, so if you’re afraid, they will be too.
As for how dogs know you are afraid, well, there are a few tells. Body language is the biggest way we communicate with canines. But can dogs actually smell your fear?
“Some 200 million or so scent receptors make it much more sensitive than the human nose,” according to The Psychology of Dog Ownership authors Theresa Barlow, PhD, and Craig Roberts. Other sources put the number at around 300 million scent receptors for dogs.
Let’s put this in terms of a real-world scenario: You just had a pizza delivered. You might smell just a pizza. Mmmm … pizza. But your dog’s nose will detect not just “pizza” but also the ingredients in the different cheeses, the spices in the sauce, the yeast in the crust, the people who handled the box and so on.
With scent being the dog’s strongest sense, it makes sense that they would use their nose to learn so much about the world around them.
Through their amazing scent receptors, a dog can sniff a person, a tree, another dog or just about anything and pick up a wealth of information. When they smell your pants leg, they’re detecting not just your laundry detergent but also where you’ve been, if you’ve been around other animals, other people’s scents and much more.
Finally, as reported previously here at Petful, dogs are even being recruited in the global fight against the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Once training is complete, the COVID-19 detection dogs are expected to be able to screen up to 250 people per hour to an extremely accurate degree, even if the humans are asymptomatic.
As reported in the journal Animal Cognition in January 2018, a team led by neurobiologist Biagio D’Aniello, PhD, of the University of Naples Federico II, conducted an experiment to see if dogs could detect chemicals related to human emotion in sweat.
These sweat samples were then randomly given to Labrador Retriever and Golden Retriever participants to sniff.
The study took place in a calm environment while the dogs were in the presence of their humans. The researchers wanted to know, “Do human body odors (chemosignals) produced under emotional conditions of happiness and fear provide information that is detectable by pet dogs?”
OK, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer: The experiment was a success. It showed that, yes, dogs can indeed “smell” fear — and happiness, too.
Dogs in the study who had been exposed to sweat from someone who was afraid demonstrated remarkably different behavior than the dogs exposed to “happy sweat.” Dogs exposed to the fear sweat had significantly higher heart rates and demonstrated higher stress indicators overall.
So, again, yes — dogs can in fact smell fear. Or, rather, dogs can detect the chemicals produced by the human body when we are afraid, and then understand in some fashion what those chemicals indicate.
Some of the same researchers went on to conduct a similar experiment with horses, the results of which were publicized in July 2018. And, surprise — it turns out that horses can smell your fear or happiness, too.
“These results are leading the way for further studies on human–animal communication through emotional chemosignals,” according to a November 2019 follow-up article published in the open-source journal Animal.
“What remains open,” the article pointed out, is if the smell of these chemicals is triggering “an automatic emotional response or whether the emotional responses are learned.”
As a professional pet sitter and dog walker, I love dogs, I work with dogs, and I understand that sometimes being confronted by an aggressive dog can be scary. In these types of scary situations, it’s best to try to de-escalate the dog’s aggression:
So, while you may smell like fear, your body language is telling the dog you are not a threat. This may buy you enough time for the dog’s human to come and corral their dog or for someone to help you.
The above scenario applies when you have a few moments to try to head off an aggressive attack. Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of time, unfortunately. In my area this past May, 3 dogs escaped their house and attacked a FedEx driver who was making a delivery. The driver was taken to a local hospital, where she was treated for her injuries. Afterward, she was reported to be “alert but shaken.” Officials noted, “It could have been a lot worse.”
In those situations, do what you have to do to get clear and get to safety. If you routinely walk in areas in which you are exposed to loose, possibly aggressive dogs, consider carrying a citronella-based deterrent spray or an air horn.
When dealing with an aggressively approaching dog, remember to “do your best to remain calm so as not to escalate the situation with your own panicked behavior,” advises dog trainer Stephanie Colman.
Everyone feels fear. It’s impossible not to be afraid. Your body odor will reflect your emotional state via chemicals released by the brain. And dogs do pick up on that fear. But you can maintain some control by exhibiting the right behaviors.