Animal Planet’s The Most Extreme recently asked the question: Do dogs have extra-sensory perception? The answer they gave was “Yes…compared to human senses, anyway.” The contention was that dog’s senses are so much better than ours that they might as well be supernatural.
I have 2 beagles. The older has a better nose than the younger. I was taking Quincy for a walk in the winter. There was a huge line of snow paralleling the road. He stopped me went to a pile and dug down about a foot. He came up with something greenish,brown which he promptly ate.
When he gets on a track the younger one runs a zig zag course in front of his path until she gets the nose message.
If I have any small scratch or wound, even something as small as a raw mosquito bite, my dog will zero right in from several feet away. He’s often found scratches or cuts on myself that I wasn’t even aware of.
“Wow, you’re right boy, I do have an owie. Good boy!”
Then there are cadaver dogs who can smell a body underwater, and other dogs that seem to be able to smell cancer…
Sometimes it surprises me how well people and dogs get along, when we can hardly imagine how they perceive the world.
Mine…cannot find his dogfood if it fell out of his bowl. We have to point to dropped food for him to clean it off the floor.
(He is the Omega Dog - so it may not be smell, but a permissions thing - if it isn’t in his bowl he isn’t sure it is his).
Just yesterday I was walking our Max (corgi mix) and saw my husband’s car parked around the block from our apartment (he’d come home about 10 minutes prior to us spotting the car). As we got closer to the car, Max raised his head up and began sniffing at the air, and then started walking towards the car. He sniffed all over the tires, and got up on his hind legs to check inside the car, looking for my husband. Max walked the rest of the way home with his nose in the air, cheeks puffing out – he could still smell my husband despite it being a pretty gusty day.
And yet with such a super sniffer, I too am amazed at how much Max likes to hang out in the bathroom while we’re, you know, using it.
Why does that surprise you? Think of all the fascinating information he gets from your bathroom stanks - what you’ve eaten, how you’re feeling, who you’ve been with …
Fire hydrants and telephone poles are the chat rooms of the dog world.
Nothing smells “bad” to a dog. It’s all just information.
I thought a beagle was simply transportation for a nose – that’s what I’ve heard from beagle people before. 
I have a JackRat (half Jack Russell/half Rat Terrier) who can sniff rodents from 30 feet away on the other side of a wall. It’s incredible. My house had a rat problem a few months ago- still not sure how, but they got into the walls- and he had fits. One day he was sitting in my lap when his (laughably huge) ears perked up, his head jerks around, he sniffs the air, and he darts from my lap, runs across the living room down a short hallway into the kitchen and before I can get in there myself he’s trapped and killed the rat.
I paid Orkin about $200 for rat control- they did exactly jack shit as far as anything remotely helpful. (Didn’t even… well, long story.) My dog however is a natural born rat killer- hard to believe how strong those instincts are in a pampered housepet. He’s killed several rats and mice since then- I no longer have a problem with them at all- and always sniffed them before anyone else saw or heard them.
Now he’s developed a thing for pigeons- a family of them has nested in a gutter next door (I live in a townhouse) and it drives him nuts he can’t get to them. When he’s upstairs he’ll climb the walls on that side of the house trying to figure a way to get there.
Well, you know what they say about pigeons, Sampiro.
LOL
I actually almost choked on my food when I read this