Dogs are born with their eyes and ears closed, with only their sense of smell to guide them to their mother and her milk. As their primary faculty, their remarkable sense of smell continues to astonish scientists. In fact scientists are currently trying to invent an artificial canine nose to compete with the real deal for use in the medical arts and sciences.
A dog’s sense of smell is somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 times more acute than ours. And the area of a dog’s brain that analyzes olfactory information is 40 times larger than a humans. To give this perspective, we can use the analogy of tossing a ball. Imagine a child can throw a ball 10 feet; a dog would be able to toss that same ball 100,000 feet or 18.9 miles.
Dogs can be trained to accurately detect the presence of explosives, drugs, cancer cells and infectious diseases in patients. Even more amazing, cadaver dogs working in open fields and woods can detect a single drop of blood or something as small as the tooth of a victim. Dogs can tell what direction someone was walking on a path, by discriminating that each step in the direction walked is minutely fresher in scent than the previous step.
So which dog breeds are the superstars of smell? We checked in with the AKC, and we've compiled the list of dog breeds with the best sense of smell.
Move on to the next page to check out the list of dog breeds with the best sense of smell:
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