Dogs smell with their tongues?

CSI Miami, last night.
A dog handler with a tracking dog tells Horatio that the dog doesn’t use his nose to search, he uses his tongue. Something about molecules in the throat activating saliva or something. I wasn’t taping so I can’t repeat exactly what he said. Any viewers out there that can explain this? Any search dog owners?

The best explanation would be: nonsense. Dogs smell with their noses just like every other mammal does, only better.

Sheer idiocy. What that TV dreck is describing is taste, not smell. The smell of food does indeed stimulate saliva production, which solubilizes food molecules, which allows them to be tasted. However, the sense of taste is even less important to dogs than it is to people - dogs have about 1700 taste buds, compared to a human’s 9,000. This makes it extremely unlikely that “dogs don’t search with their noses.”

However, there’s a remote possibility (I didn’t watch CSI Miami) that the object of the search was something that gets a spectacular response from the taste buds, but not from the olfactory bulb, so that, for this object, they brought in a dog who was trained to search by panting and not by sniffing. More likely, though, is that once again Mr. CSI Writer was misrepresenting something he didn’t really understand.

Many years ago I saw an explanation of the reason that dogs can track scents better than humans. If the olfactory nerve endings for a human nose were spread out on a flat surface, they would cover an area about the size of a postage stamp. A dog’s nerve endings would cover a handkerchief.

I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard that dogs sweat with their tongues. Unlike humans who perspire when they are overheated, dogs supposedly give off excess body heat but exhaling hot wet air. Maybe some TV writer got confused about his factoids.

Regardless if they lose heat this way or not it’s not sweating. The only place furry animals like dogs and cats have sweat glands is under their paws.

The dog was searching for a kidnapped six year old girl. It ran through the streets with its handler and the cops, following the exhaust of the car that snatched her, finally stopping where they got out of the car…and lo and behold, they found evidence at that spot. You are all correct. It was bullshit.