How Powerful is an Animals Sense of Smell?
A dog’s ability to detect scents is legendary. Humans are olfactory dunces compared to dogs. The difference is in the anatomy of a dog’s nose. We have two sheets of membranes in our noses that contain roughly five million olfactory (smell) receptors whereas the dogs have intricately folded sheets of membranes with a surface area fifty times larger than that of humans and with more than 220 million sensory cells. Thus, a dog’s sense of smell is at least one hundred times and possibly one hundred thousand times more sensitive than a human’s. For instance, your Pooch can detect the odour of your fingerprint six weeks after you placed it onto a piece of glass. Further dogs used to detect chemical residues such as chlordane and dieldrin in soil can detect these chemicals in parts of less than one per million – better than most scientific measuring equipment!! Doesn’t that make you feel like a dunce? Territorial Marking Behaviour It is for this reason that a dog is so fascinated with the uri
