A dog’s sense of smell is amazing. Dogs have 300 million scent receptors compared to our 6 million, and can smell early stages of cancer, a diabetic attack, even 1 bedbug deep in a mattress. There’s only one word to describe a dog’s sense of smell:
It’s hard to picture just how powerful a dog’s sense of smell can be: anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 better than ours!
Picture 2,000,000 barrels of apples. Your Morkie could snuff out ONE BAD APPLE from the 2 million barrels!
Who smelled it better?
OK, to recap: the number of receptor cells that make up a dog’s sense of smell: 300,000,000. In people, 6,000,000. A dog’s ability to process that sense of smell is 10,000 to 100,000 times more efficient than ours. And the part of a dog’s brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is, proportionally speaking, 40 times bigger.
Keep your Morkie’s nose in good shape – read more.
Just look at what Morkies can snuff out!
- bedbugs – even just one, deep in a mattress
- early stage cancer in small samples of human urine, saliva or expelled breath
- the spikes and drops in human blood sugar that is diabetes
- dogs can smell fear, anxiety, even sadness
- adrenaline, so they know if someone’s about to run
- a dog can detect CDs and DVDs (layers of ‘polycarbonate plastic) in bags and packages, inside a truck. These dogs alert police to large stashes of pirated movies
- narcolepsy service dogs can detect a subtle biochemical change in the form of an odour when an attack is coming on
- migraines – dogs can alert sufferers up to 2 hours ahead, that a headache is on its way
We come home and smell beef stew cooking. Your Morkie can smell each and every spice, ingredient and liquid — separately. According to author (“Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know”) and dog expert Alexandra Horowitz, while we might notice if our coffee has had a teaspoon of sugar added to it, a dog could detect a teaspoon of sugar in a million gallons of water, or two Olympic-sized pools worth. Another dog scientist explains that dogs smell in 3-D; each nostril can register different scents separately.
