A DOG NOSE...

Dogs experience the world nose-first

How does a dog get the neighborhood news? Through its nose! Of all a dog's senses, its sense of smell is the most highly developed. Dogs have about 25 times more olfactory (smell) receptors than humans do. These receptors occur in special sniffing cells deep in a dog's snout and are what allow a dog to "out-smell" humans.

Dogs can sense odors at concentrations nearly 100 million times lower than humans can. They can detect one drop of blood in five quarts of water! Sniffing the bare sidewalk may seem crazy, but it yields a wealth of information to your dog, whether it's the scent of the poodle next door or a whiff of the bacon sandwich someone dropped last week.

When a dog breathes normally, air doesn't pass directly over the smell receptors. But when the dog takes a deep sniff, the air travels all the way to the smell receptors, near the back of the dog's snout. So for a dog, sniffing is a big