I sometimes get on my feed these humorous videos of people hiding from their dogs by ducking behind something, or maybe doing some slight-of-hand with a snack - seemingly perplexing the poor animal. Is this really possible? Can’t dogs easily sniff out you or the snack? Have some breeds lost their ancestral olfactory skills?
My WAG is that the animal hasn’t lost its sense of smell, but rather, since this silly stunt is done in the person’s home, the scent is all over the home and that’s not very informative for the critter. But, as I said, that’s my WAG.
Dogs’ sense of smell is much better than ours, and their vision perhaps a bit worse, but they still use vision and scent for different purposes. Even for a dog, vision is still the better sense for determining precisely where something is right this moment (unless it’s being confused by tricksy humans). The dog probably could eventually find the treat or toy or whatever by scent, but that’d require a bit of snuffling about, first.
We used to have a standard poodle named Tillie. I’d entertain little kids by giving them a treat and tell them to hide it in one hand then bring both hands out in front of them. Tillie would look closely at each hand (actually of course sniffing them of course) then reach up with her paw and tap the one with the treat. She never missed.
Our Chocolate Lab is totally blind. When he eats his kibble, he does so with such gusto that he often throws a piece or two out of his bowl. He will then sniff around for the stragglers, and will always end up finding them, even if they are far away, or under an obstacle.
There is also a wide range of olfactory ability among dogs. I’ve been to competitions for dogs trained in scent detection/nose work. There are concentrations of scent that 90% of dogs will simply not detect, but “super-smellers” will.
In competition the same few dogs will repeatedly win.
That’s what the dogs thinking watching you.
Thanks, all. It does make sense that if the owner’s scent is all over the dog would be operating by sight. Maybe those videos just cut off before the dog puts its nose to the floor and gets serious about finding you.
I hide from my dogs all the time.
Bayliss looks at me and just sits down somewhere. Not wasting one iota of care on it.
Betsy the beagle is a ground sniffer. Of course my scent is everywhere but she generally gets in my vicinity. She just never looks up. I have to make a sound first. And she’s super happy to see me everytime.
The Chihuahuas are all over the place. Mostly following Betsy. They do look up and start the yap chorus.
And I’m found.
Eh, it’s a game.
Our German Shepherd Kali had an incredible nose. She was trained using q-tips dipped in balsam scent. The q-tip was placed in a little screen box which was then hidden somewhere. The command “Find It” would make her start sniffing through the house, and she’d find it. If the scent was placed in a kitchen cabinet, she’d paw at the cabinet door.
We also did an exercise where my gf would leave her hoodie in the garage, then go for a hike in the woods. After a 15 minute head start, I’d take Kali to the garage and present the hoodie to her, saying “Find It”.
My gf’s scent was all over the place, but Kali would find the freshest scent trail and follow it. My gf could try to evade the dog; doubling back, walking in a creek, etc, but Kali always found her.
ETA: Canine NoseWork
A dog’s ability to smell is between 1000 to 10,000 times greater than a human’s. Dogs track using the decay rate of odor between footprints. That’s why it’s very hard for dogs to track wheeled vehicles, although there are dogs who can do this also. There are cadaver dogs which can scent a corpse under water.
I’ve worked with Search and Rescue dogs (being a trainer’s helper) and it doesn’t matter how well or how far away you hide, they will find you. I’ve been buried in a pile of leaves half a mile from the sending area in a trackless forest and it took that dog fifteen minutes to find me.
The plain truth is that you cannot hide something from a dog. But whether they indeed find it also depends on how motivated they are. High play drive, high food drive, and/or high prey drive, will be the determining qualities.
I was backpacking in the Sierras with one of my Aussies and our group got lost because we deviated from the cairn-marked path across a gigantic sheet of granite, which was also littered with rocks. Once off the path you could not see which were cairns and which were just rocks. We tried to find the path for an hour; meanwhile I was suffering some from altitude sickness and was mostly just leaning against a big boulder trying to stay out of the sun, and Bonnie was sitting at my feet. At last I said miserably, “oh Bonnie, I just want to go home.” At that, she pricked up her ears and trotted over to where the trail entered the forest, back toward base camp, and looked back inquiringly. For her, the invisible trail was marked in neon.
She also found any number of lost items throughout her life, from chickens to hats. I never trained her to do this, really. I would just say “Find it Bonnie!” and she would go look until she found something, usually what I was looking for. Miss that dog.
Our dog is very good at this. I try to hide from her every day, but she finds me easily. At this point the game is more about me finding a hiding spot she dosent know about. I’ll toss a ball down the hall and while she gets it I have about 4 seconds to duck somewhere. Sometimes, while she’s getting a drink from her bowl in the laundry room, it’s the perfect time to hide, maybe in a closet with the door closed. I can hear her running around looking for me, probably by sight as others are saying, but then as she closes in I can hear the “sniff-sniff-sniff”. So I think she uses all her senses, depending on what they are telling her.
I’ll play with my dogs where I sit in front of them with a treat, pass it back and forth from one hand to the other, and then put both fists on the ground with the treat in one fist or the other. The dogs seem to just guess at which hand has the treat based on sight. They’re not very accurate. But if I have them stay in one room while I hide a treat in another room and then tell them to go find the treat, they can find it pretty quickly. They’re not just turning stuff over randomly trying to find the treat. They sniff all around the room and zero in on where the treat is. Maybe they switch between vision and smell modes, where they are primarily using one or the other. If one mode doesn’t work, then they switch to the other. That would make sense in the wild. Use the more efficient vision ability first and fall back to scent if necessary.
I had a very intelligent black lab.
I’d often try to play hide and seek with him.
Would never work, he’d always sniff me out. Here I would be, buried deep in a closet shrouded by a bunch of old coats, and he’d just stand there for a beat, then emit a sharp bark.
Until he on his own decided one day to NOT use his nose, just his eyes and ears. He figured out it wasn’t fun when he cheated, iow.
I used to live in Taos, NM right next to the Kit Carson Natl Forest. At the time, I had a wolf/shepherd dog. We hiked in the mountains a lot. As we hiked up the trails, he would get way ahead or way behind scouting on his own. I would take these opportunities to hide from him. As a puppy, I could confuse him but after he grew up, there was no chance.
Here’s a story from that time. On a hike up a side canyon he got way behind - from my higher vantage point it was easy to see. The canyon was solid, flat rock.
I stepped off, as gingerly as I could, and hiked about 50 feet off to the side, hiding behind a large boulder. When he decide to catch up, he came racing up the canyon at top speed. At the point I cut off, he literally screeched to a halt and walked right up to me.
This was pretty typical.
Tiptoeing away doesn’t work because the dog isn’t just able to smell where a foot has touched the ground. There are all kinds of scents we leave behind from things like fragrances in our clothing and grooming products, skin cells, microscopic fibers from our clothing, moisture from our breath, etc. All of these things linger in the air and fall to the ground. A dog’s nose is able to pick up the scents from these tiny smells and follow the path. They can even do it in water with proper training. All those same scent producing molecules land in the water and get caught in eddies and such that the dog can smell by sniffing the water.
We can sort of do the same thing ourselves, but the scent has to be really strong. If someone in your office has a strong perfume or cologne, you can sometimes tell where they’ve been in the various hallways of your office building. Depending on how fresh and strong the scent is, you may even be able to tell how recently they were in a certain location. Dogs are pretty much using that technique, but they can do it with a tiny fraction of the scent that we would need.
This scented coworker example may be analogous to the situation in the OP. If you’re trying to find your coworker Pat, you’re going to first use your eyes to look around the most obvious places. If you don’t see Pat in the usual places, then you might remember that Pat wears a lot of patchouli oil and start wondering around the office trying to find where the patchouli scent is strongest.
Similar story. Years ago we were backpacking with our dog and it was an out-back trip. On the way out, I stepped off the trail a few yards to pee and return to the trail, and she followed. Two days later walking past the same spot on the way back, and she veered-off to the same spot, then returned to the trail.
The funny videos confusing dogs rely on rushing the dog into making some sort of on-the-spot decision of where something is, without giving them the time to sniff it out, and they often include a form of confusing the dog into using a less developed sense the trickster can deceive easier such as sight.
The dog will be able to find something hidden if they have enough time, just like a human will eventually figure out where the magician is hiding the rabbit if they have the time to inspect all his pockets and hat. We can even sniff some things out just like a dog, it just takes a long time (ever tracked down a hidden pile of cat barf?)
Imagine walking into a kitchen where bacon has just been fried, but having to instantly pick which of the 5 people is holding a strip of bacon behind there back.
Yes it’s possible to hide something from a dog, otherwise there would be no missing anything. BUT, it’s really hard for a human to do so because our sense of smell is so comparatively poor that we are guessing what and how much the dog might be sensing… and we usually underestimate.
I used to know a person who trained drug-detecting dogs. Of course I had all kinds of questions for her. No matter what I proposed the answer was always, “they’ll find it.” She said trying hide drugs from a dog inside a full coffee can for example is like trying to hide your refrigerator by moving it to the center of the living room. It’s still obvious, possibly even more so, it’s just someplace you’re not expecting it.