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A Dog’s Strongest Sense

The 5 senses that a dog has are: Smell, Hearing, Taste, Touch and Site.

Which of these is the strongest? If you guessed ‘Smell’, you’re barking up the right tree!
It has been found that a dog’s sense of smell can be 10,000 to 100,000 times stronger than ours.  There are several factors why dogs have such a great sense of smell.

  1. Olfactory Receptors (Smell Receptors): While humans have around 6 million olfactory receptors, dogs can have 300 million of them. That’s 50 times more than us!  No wonder they are quite the sniffers!
  2. Jacobson’s Organ: Dogs even have a secondary olfactory organ called ‘Jacobson’s organ’. It is located inside the nasal cavity and its purpose is specifically for chemical communication.  Chemical communication is often used to mark territories.
  3. Olfactory Lobe: The olfactory lobe’s function is to understand what smell is. Not surprisingly, a dog’s olfactory lobe is much larger than ours is – a whopping 40x bigger!

There are some breeds that have better noses than others. Such breeds include the Bloodhound, Beagle, German Shepherd, Dachshund, Foxhound and Labrador Retriever (just to name a few)!  Factors like snout length, number of olfactory glands, skin folds and ear length can attribute to better sense of smells. Dogs are so cool!

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