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“Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell,” by Alexandra Horowitz, a professor of cognitive science who runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, is a book worth reading. The author explains the elegant engineering of the dog’s olfactory system and how familiar canine behaviors – licking, sneezing, tail-wagging – have associations with smell. Dr. Horowitz also describes how she trained herself to enhance her inferior human sniffing ability.

   

The Sniff Test

“There are many ways to sniff, and the human method is not the best,” Dr. Horowitz said. Sniff researchers (yes, you read that correctly) have found we have about six million olfactory receptors; dogs have 300 million. Humans sniff once per second-and-a-half; dogs, five to 10 times a second.

“They even exhale better than we do,” Dr. Horowitz continued, describing a sort of doggy yoga breath. Dogs exhale through the side slits of their nostrils, so they keep a continuous flow of inhaled air in their snout for smelling. “This gives them a continuous olfactory view of the world.”

And while our schnozzes get the job done, the dog’s snout is superb. Dog sniffs are designed to send odor-carrying air along its length, she said, humidifying, warming and cleaning it along the way to the back of the nose.

 

Why do dogs like to smell and lick stinky toes?

Licking is related to smell, Dr. Horowitz said. Dogs and many other animals have a second smell system called the vomeronasal organ (VNO) above the roof of their mouth and below the septum dividing the sides of the nose.

Sniffs pick up airborne odors, but the sensitive VNO can detect the smell of molecules that have been absorbed in tissue. One way is through licking. “They like to get a full measure of the smell, all of its details,” Dr. Horowitz said, explaining why dogs get so up close and personal with one another and us. “They have a great instinct for analyzing it.

 

Why do dogs love to roll around in things that smell repulsive?

One theory is that their sense of smell is really a complex motor system related to the brain. And so, Dr. Horowitz said, when Finn alights upon a rotting squirrel corpse in the park, the smell that fires up the olfactory lobe in his brain also travels to the motor cortex and tells him to lean his whole body into the found object of desire.