My neighbors were out for the last two days and I was letting their dogs out so I tried an experiment. They have an older dog about 12 and another dog who is just over a year but still acts like a puppy.
Instead of going over at noon and letting them out to play (they have a big yard), I made a hamburger. Then I divided it in two pieces and put each half in a seperate section of the yard.
I let the dogs out and threw each a ball, like I always do. Both brought the balls back, then I threw them again, (purposely away from where I hid the hamburger pieces), the young dog didn’t notice, but the older dog, stopped and then started looking around. He then immediately started sniffing and to my surprise he found BOTH in less than five minutes.
Of course the young dog tried to bully the old one into giving him the food. (He always did this, so I let they young guy take one of the pieces away. But that’s another thread)
So my question is, how good of a nose does your dog have. I was surprised at how good the dog was and quickly he caught the sent. I think tomorrow I’ll try it again at the park.
I sometimes put a biscuit on the coffee table which is about six inches higher than both my jack russels head. They sniff it out the first time they walk by.
Our Bichon’s nose is amazing. She helped us find a lost hamster lately. My wife noticed my daughter’s hamster cage was left open and the rodent was gone. They started looking for the hamster and along came the dog and led them right to the hamster: behind a chest in the living room. It never ceases to amaze me how sensitive their noses are, and yet they don’t seem bothered by – ahem, the smell of normal daily bodily functions.
I don’t know if my dog could smell a hamburger hiding in the yard, but that sounds like a fun game I think I will try it this spring.
One time I had a raccoon get stuck in my garage, and when I let Dolly out (through the garage) in the morning, she showed me exactly where he had been. She sniffed from the door to the dog food bin, then up the shelves and across the garage to where it had exited. That was impressive.
Another time I had a friend over without her here, and she spent a good long while sniffing where he had been sitting on the couch. She payed particular attention to the floor where his un-shoed feet had been.
Just last night, a person at the dog park told me that my dog had found the treat she didn’t know she had burried in her coat pocket. He is so funny - doesn’t get pushy about it. He just sits like a good boy and looks up at the person with pleading eyes. If the person moves or turns around, he will run around to sit again in front of them. This happens all the time to people who can’t figure out why my dog is stalking them.
My Eskie, may he rest in peace, had the worst sniffer ever.
After he went to doggy heaven and my now-ex-wife and I got two new pups, it was quite the adjustment for us in learning how to deal with dogs whose noses not only worked, but worked really well! One of them was turning into quite the budding counter surfer when I moved out.
My dog is a beagle, so of course they’re known for their good sniffers.
Sometimes Bud will come in from the outside and immediately make a beeline
for me in whatever room I happen to be in. He must smell me. Amazing.
And, of course, I know that petting another dog (or god forbid, a cat!), even a simple “pat-pat,” will result in a serious nose grilling when I return home.
When we go out to eat, the girls will hide bits of leftover chicken, etc., in the yard. Then we say, “Release the hound!” and let him go to town.
Like PunditLisa, I have a beagle. He is a nose, with four legs and a tail. Whenever we hide food in the yard, he finds them all, but the Lab/boxer almost never does.
Caesar Milan made scent trails for one of the dogs on his show by blending chicken and water into a slurry, put it into a condiment squeeze bottle, squirted it onto the ground and put chunks of chicken at the ends of the trails. That would be a good activity to occupy scent hounds.
Big dog/Little dog here (well actually two big dogs and one little dog but we’ll just review the opposite ends of the spectrum).
Little dog. Some kind of pit bull terrier/short hair pointer mix that wandered into my in-laws garage and ended up at our house. Will walk past a raw steak and not flinch. I have to, literally, snap my fingers about one inch over a piece of food that has fallen on the floor in order to get him to eat it.
Big dog. Half labrador and half idiot. Not the smartest dog you’ve ever met but nice enough and loves to play ball. Will play until he collapses from exhaustion. To slow down the game, I will go over to my front yard with the ball (actually one of those little red rubber kong toys because he destroys everything else) and a baseball bat. From my front lawn, I can hit the ball with the bat and launch it down into our front field 150-200 feet away. The front field is about two acres and currently covered in dense fiddleneck about 3 feet high. The dog will go back and forth searching until he finds the ball - it usually takes him less than 5 minutes.
My lab would play hide and seek with me. I’d toss a toy or something, then while he was retrieving it behind the couch or somewhere, I’d hightail it into a closet somewhere. He could always sniff me out-until all on his own he stopped sniffing the carpet to find me, and would sight search instead. Yes, he apparently had a sense of fair play.
There is some interesting stuff to be read about dogs’ senses. Tales of what bloodhouds can do is absolutely fascinating. For example, when encountering a trail, they can tell which direction the target was heading in by the relative strength of scent of the footprints.
It is hard for us to fully comprehend how they experience the world. I remember seeing it written that the way we are designed to perceive things through vision, they see through smell. They have a similar proportion of their brain dedicated to scent as humans do to sight. Their sight is more attuned to perceive motion than detail or color.
Another beagle owner, here. I have two of the critters. They have great noses. In fact, I like to say that the nose is the heart, mind, and soul of the beagle.
I have two dogs. The younger dog will come in from outside and immediately sniff the other dogs mouth. If he had a cookie, she comes to find me to get hers.
I’ve never had a dog that DIDN’T have a nose that was almost the stuff of superhero-like powers. A dog’s sense of smell is a natural wonder. Their perception of the world is quite unlike our own.
Going off on a tangent, my dog was watching me eat something when one of the cats walked across the carpet about 10 feet directly behind her. The dog could not possibly have seen the cat, but her ears twitched around to whatever she heard…I don’t know if it was the cat’s breathing, or the slight snag of a claw in the carpet, but it was very impressive.
I tried it at the park, the old guy has about a range of 25 - 30 feet, before he can’t smell it.
They young guy is pretty good at learning from the old one, but he seems happy just to let the old guy find the food then run over and bully him into giving it up.
