Or if not her son, tell that we’re related in some way or another? We live a couple towns apart and I don’t drop by her house very often but, when I do, can her dog recognize by scent that she and I are part of the same family group? If so, is there reason to believe it would influence the dog’s opinion of me (all other things being equal)?
I don’t know, but I’ll sign up for your newsletter.
Ha! No great story or theory behind it. Just a thought as I was stopping by to let the dog out while she’s on a trip. The dog was sniffing at me and I wondered if I smelled familiar in a “one of the pack” sense.
I highly doubt it. If you lived with your mom then you would have similar scents from furnishings, etc. But I don’t think a dog can detect DNA with its nose.
I have never seen any reliable information on this. I think the answers are largely speculative, and this belongs in IMHO.
So what will Brenna make of it Memorial Day weekend when we expect our daughter, husband, kids and dogs, our son, maybe his wife and dog, and my brother. She has seen our daughter’s family several times, but our son only briefly when she was 9 weeks old. Of course, our dogs have been carefully socialized to be friendly to everybody.
Our friend related once she was meeting her sister and picking up her dog. The sister got there first, and the dog was excited to see her. Of course the ladies look alike, and their voices are alike. To a dog, they may even smell alike. I keep my nose out of their crotches. I am not sure if the dog had seen the sister before.
I don’t think this is something you could prove one way or the other.
And I suspect the dog picks up more on the ‘happy hormones’ your mother secretes when seeing you (and that you secrete when seeing your mother), than any particular similarities between your and your mother’s respective scents.
I would imagine in most cases the dog “thinks” something along these lines:
New Person! Hmmm… My Person Likes This Person. This Person is OK.
I’d vote that way. 
Well, no. But it stands to reason that my scent is partially derived from the DNA I inherited from my parents just like my other physical characteristics. I’ve heard stuff about dogs smelling in parts per million versus parts per thousand for humans and didn’t know if it could tell the difference. Anyway, it seems the answer is somewhere between “No” and “Dunno”.
It would be colossally easy to test this one out scientifically, wouldn’t it?
Yes, this is true. Dogs read us like a book and our reactions highly color theirs. This also complicates the question of do they recognize their relatives?
Dogs probably can identify close human relatives by smell; rats can.
I think the answer is “it’s not unlikely.”
It’s been demonstrated that mice can identify relatives (or at least individuals that are likely to be relatives), even ones they’ve never been in contact with, through their sense of smell.
It’s quite possible that you have a distinctive set of proteins that are more similar to those of your mother than they are to unrelated individuals, and that dogs could potentially detect these.
Now, that may not mean that the dog actually recognizes you as relatives, but the similarity of your odor to that of your mother could possibly affect the dog’s behavior even if its never met you before.
There have been studies indicating that women can detect by scent differences in the “major histocompatibility complex” aka MHC, which appears to let them detect how closely related a male probably is. A shirt worn by a man with a similar MHC to her own will smell “like Dad” and the scent won’t appeal to her. If a mere human nose can tell I’d think a dog would do far better; the dog might not know for sure that you are her son, but the dog can probably make a good guess that you are closely related.
But even if the dog could smell something, would they necessarily know what it meant? Like, do they have a concept of “related to”?
Well, they certainly can emotionally distinguish inner circle pack members, outer circle pack members, benign strangers, suspicious strangers – although I don’t know if this is by smell I don’t think it’s a wild hypothesis.
Dogs can smell corpses under rivers, can smell when someone is about to have an epileptic seizure, can smell when an earthquake is about to happen (my dogs actually did this) . . . the more we find out what dogs can smell, the more astonishing it seems.
related to above post: I read a study a long time ago about early-onset puberty in girls. There were a few predictive factors, including obesity, drinking a lot of milk with artificial hormones in it, and – living with an adult male who was not their biological father.
Which is to say, female humans at least, apparently do detect relatedness although not consciously, and react to it physiologically. Why not dogs?
Well, yeah, that’s what I’m saying – the dog may detect something but are they conscious of it? I mean, would a dog “know” its own parent past a certain age? Are most dogs aware of their fathers (in environments where both the mother and father dog are present)? I mean, obviously a puppy knows its mother because the mother raises them but it doesn’t seem like they have familial relationships the way we do. They’re aware of pack relations, but being in someone’s pack doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with being genetically related to them.
Purely anecdotally, but my brother stayed with us for a few months. It took a very short time for him (an anxious dog to say the least) to acclimate to my brother and even began snuggling with him - when no one else was home, of course.
Brother moved out, came back about a month or so later to grab some stuff he’d left, dog avoided him all over again.
It’s also quite odd to all the family that when my parents come, my mother will try her best to befriend and play with the dog, and he’ll have none of it. Yet my father, who is totally noncommittal, ignoring the animal (but not in a mean way), gets all the attention. My mother really dislikes this. She has even babysat the dog while we’ve been away, and he’s never snuggled with her. He’ll share a bed with her but she said he just kind of looks at her funny.
Butt sniffing is a complex behavior in dogs. Part of it has to do with checking to see if the dog is part of the pack and has been eating the same thing. Now tomorrow I will have my puppy at a meeting where it and most of the other dogs are all eating Pro Plan. Will the puppies think they are all the same pack? There may even be some litter mates.
Neither of these things surprises me. Dogs with a very low threshold for acceptance (“never met a stranger”) are for whatever reason considered normal and right-minded in our society (think Labrador). But many, even most dogs are not like this. I have a very reserved dog who has to get used to almost anybody he sees irregularly as if he’d never met them. And he always remains a bit on edge around them. On the other hand, he grew up with my daughter and when she comes home from college to visit after months of being away, he turns inside out with joy. I believe he would remember her if he didn’t see her for years.
As for your dog’s reaction to your parents, my educated guess is that your dog treats your dad as an obvious pack leader and your mom, not so much. Contrary to popular belief, romping and snuggles do not necessarily endear you to a dog. Calm authority does. Dogs aren’t children, they are adult animals of another species.