My dog wolfs down food so quickly that I have a hard time believing he is actually tasting what he is eating. For example, a piece of meat is gone in one second flat…it’s like he doesn’t even bother chewing it.
So…do dogs actually taste what they eat?
I’m fairly certain our old dog did. She was a very fussy (and slow) eater, and would eventually snub every single brand of dog food which we gave to her.
The short answer appears to be yes, but not as well as you’d think. Also, Fancy Feast is evidently a ripoff because cats can’t taste for beans.
Even wolfing their food down, dogs taste much more than you would if you chewed the same food for 20 minutes.
Most of what we call “taste” is in fact smell. You can confirm this yourself quite simply by holding someone’s nose closed and placing food on their tongue. Even with just the external nose closed people can’t distinguish most fruits form one another, so apple, for example, tastes identical to a banana. Foods that have very little taste, such as boiled egg and cheese, are also indistinguishable. So what we call taste is mostly smell. As we chew our food the air passes over the olfactory receptors in the nose and we detect that as taste, but in reality it isn’t.
Dogs have a sense of smell orders of magnitude better than a human’s. It is so much better that we actually don’t know how much better. Certainly tens of thousands of times better, probably millions. It’s not just down to the sensitivity and concentration of the olfactory receptors, dogs have much more of their brain devoted to interpreting smells. Even if a human had the same physical hardware as a dog, our sens eof smell wouldnt; be much improved because we simply can not process the information.
So while you might think your dog couldn’t taste much in the 0.0006 seconds that food spend sin its mouth, it is in fact much more aware of the taste of the food than you could ever be.
The link provided by Soul makes the common mistake of conflating the sensation of taste with the sense of taste. Of course this isn’t true. The sense of taste is an almost insignificant part of the sensation of taste.
I like Coren’s stuff, but towards the end he repeats that old canard of the tongue map. :smack:
ETA: I’ve seen it described as flavor = olfaction + taste; or taste = olfaction + gustation, etc. Just a difference in terminology. Closing your nose effects some tastes/flavors but not all. The umami sense (or maybe just MSG) is relatively insensitive to smell.
The five basic tastes are not affected by smell. Even someone who is totally anosmic will taste salt as salty, coffee as bitter, sugar as sweet and lemon as sour.
The important point however is that an anosmic person won’t be able to distinguish between coffee and methylated spirits based on taste. Or between honey and corn syrup. Conversely a person who has burned off all their taste buds will instantly be able to differentiate those substances by taste.
These are not foods that a normal person would say taste even remotely alike, so clearly the sense of taste is a very minor part of the sensation of taste. A such the fact that dogs and cats have fewer taste buds than human isn’t in any way indicative of a less well developed ablility to taste.
Anyone who has tried to slip medicine into cat food knows that isn’t true. No way could a human taste a 10mg pill in a stinking mess of fish guts. Yet any cat in the world will taste it infallibly, and spit it out.
You do have to wonder the way many dogs inhale their food. Dogs do have a range of eating styles. Labs mostly vary from greedy to down right terrible. Some even requiring slowing down. You can spread the food out on a cookie sheet or something. Some of my friends just throw it on the floor of the crate. You can put large rocks in the food dish, much to big to swallow. Either way, the dog can’t gulp down one big mouthful after another.
We did have one Lab that refused to eat enough to keep his ribs from showing. That is more common in Shepherds, Boxers, Great Danes, and Salukis are the very worst. A lady once posted that she carries a note from her vet to keep the RSPCA off her back.
Fussy eaters are often over fed, How To Tell if Your Dog is at a Healthy Weight – Long Live Your Dog
I’ve heard that the dog’s dominance status can affect its eating habits. An omega dog will wolf things down while it has the chance, because a higher-ranked dog could come along at any time and take the food back. The alpha, though, will eat with more leisure, since he knows that nobody else would dare take his food away.
Of course, humans generally train dogs to be submissive to humans, so most pet dogs will be in the quick-eating category.
I think you are on to something there. It’s probably more smell than taste. A good hunting dog won’t bite, it mouths. Therefore, give it a bowl of dry food and it gets inhaled, not eaten. Yes, there are a few pieces that get in the way of their teeth but not the majority. I would joke about my beagle, “He doesn’t bite, I can’t even get him to chew his food.”
You’re right. Make that MSG then that has minimal olfactory help.
Yes, they can taste things and many have preferences for ‘tasty’ foods. Ever try giving your dog his kibble while you’re eating something delicious and stinky, like a hot dog? Many will beg for the savory food first before eating what they already have.
‘Wolfing’ food is a common canine eating strategy for many reasons. In a pack situation, unless they are socially dominant, it’s to their advantage to swallow anything they can get as fast as they can. Anything that doesn’t have to be chewed (like bones) gets swallowed whole. Their stomach acid is very strong and can deal with large pieces. Wild canines also don’t necessarily have the opportunity to eat a big meal on a regular basis, so they tend to gorge massively when given the chance, sleep it off, and then hope they can get lucky enough to bring down large prey the next day. All of these factors still apply to our modern Fido, even though he gets a square meal of kibble twice a day plus treats.
My dog also seems to inhale her food yet I believe she differentiates the taste. As an example, if I’m eating popcorn, she’ll sit patiently waiting for me to toss her a piece. On the other hand, she’s had ice cream before so if I eat ice cream in front of her, she still sits patiently but there’s some definite drooling going on because in my opinion, she remembers the taste.
I hope they don’t… (the smell is enough to makes me sick)
Our Chow/Shepard is practically a cannine vacum, while our Pomeranian is almost irritating to watch he is so picky and slow. The funny thing however is our Chow loves Jelly Belly’s. If I am eating them on the couch he will sit paitently, even for an hour, waiting for me to hand him one of his favorites. His favorites are blueberry btw. Once he gets it he will spend two or three minutes licking and rolling it around his mouth. So I would say that dogs, or at least my dog, seems to be able to taste. Mmmmmm Jelly Belly’s.
Too bad Buttered Popcorn or Cappuccino or another gross flavor wasn’t his favorite. Someone’s got to do it!
Tried to get him interested in the black ones (licorice) but he just spit them out.
This dog seems to have tasted something: http://flvrd.com/pic/husky-puppy-tastes-the-lime-gif/
A friend used to order an extra steak at steak houses for his dog, easily $30+ steaks. His dog would inhale it so fast this big thick steak would simply disappear in one motion. I used to tell him it’s such a waste. He’d say he feels so bad about not spending enough quality time with his dog and the dog is a member of his family that he should get to eat a good steak too. Maybe I was wrong?
We just discovered last weekend that our beagle will even eat the licorice ones.
My wife is from Wis and they have a Jelly Belly factory near where her mother lives. Every few months mom will send me 6 or 7 HUGE bags of Belly Flops. Irregular shaped Belly’s that aren’t up to shape standard, but taste perfectly fine. These are less than 1/2 the cost of “perfect” Bellys. Needless to say I get quite a few licorice ones and I usually put them in a baggie in case someone somewhere might actually be twisted enough to like them. Perhaps I should ship my collection to your beagle!