Your Pup’s Perception: Scent
Dogs are experts at telling people apart. A trained trailing dog can follow a complete stranger’s scent for miles, and he can tell that person’s scent apart from others. Dogs can even sniff out the differences between identical twins.
Bearing this in mind, it’s not surprising that your dog can also remember your scent when you aren’t around, according to a study published in a recent issue of Behavioral Processes. Scientists trained a group of dogs to sit while in an MRI machine and then individually recorded their brain activity as they reacted to the scents of people and dogs who weren’t present. These included a strange dog, a dog with whom they lived, a strange person, and a person with whom they lived — excluding their owners, since the owners had to act as handlers while the dogs were in the MRI.
The dogs exhibited greater brain activity for familiar people than for any other scent, even familiar dogs. Not only do dogs recognize and remember their humans’ scents, but they also get more excited about a whiff of “their” humans than about anything else.
We tend to think that dogs depend on their noses to find and recognize everything in their world, including people, but it turns out that they’re also very good at using their eyes. Dogs evolved to read human behavior and expressions as a result of their canine ancestors, who received warm places to sleep around human campfires by making people happy. To succeed at a survival strategy based on making another species happy, you need to develop a knack for reading expressions and body language — and that’s just what dogs have done.
A study led by Paolo Mongillo at the University of Padua in Italy in 2010 found that dogs can pick their owners out of a crowd by recognizing their faces. When dogs watched their owners and random strangers walk back and forth in a room, the dogs paid much more attention their owners than to the strangers. When both humans wore masks over their faces, however, the dogs had difficulty telling them apart and seemed to pay about the same amount of attention to both people.
Dogs notice when you’re sad, mad, or suspicious. They can even detect cancer. Turns out, dogs know more about your emotions and health than you ever suspected.
I know when you’re being rude and I’m not impressed.
This strikes me as a pretty interesting point because it shows how advanced a dog’s emotional capabilities really are. A study showed that a group of dogs who observed other people being rude to their owners actually resulted in the dogs negatively evaluating that person who mistreated their owner. There really isn’t much else to say other than, simply put, be kind to one another – at least for the sake of your pooch!