08/27/2026
DO YOU KNOW HOW AMAZING YOUR DOG'S NOSE IS?! 👃🧠
If you want to offer your dog(s) an amazing smorgasbord of smells, try walking them at dinner time when most of your neighbors are cooking meals! Or visit a pet store (if safe to do so) - a candy store for dogs! Or walk them on garbage collection day!
Things that smell absolutely gross to us humans, smell wonderful to our dogs!
[I don't allow dogs to get into the garbage, nor do I allow them to p*e up garbage totes!]. Dogs don't even need to get close to the garbage to be able to smell what's in there! But it offers them a magnitude of scent, and we all know dogs love nothing more than sniffing scent - it triggers neural brain networks (or doggy data analysts as my retired IT Consultant hubby calls it!).
Some dog nose facts:
➡️ Dogs noses are fascinating and did you know they are as unique as a human fingerprint! Each dog's rhinarium (the section of bare skin at the tip of a dog's nose) has a distinguishing design of dimples, dots and ridges, making them all different!
➡️ Dogs have been reported to smell objects and people over 12 miles away (just over 19 kms!), depending on conditions such as wind, direction and type of scent. Dogs olfactory systems work so well that they can be trained to pick up odors as little as a pictogram, which is a trillionth of a gram! How awesome is that!!
➡️ Dogs devote lots of brain power to interpreting smells. They have more than 100 million sensory receptor sites in the nasal cavity compared to 6 million in people and the area of the canine brain devoted to analyzing odors is about 40 times larger than the comparable part of the human
brain.
✅️ This is why it is so important to allow our dogs time to sniff on their walks. Not only is it rewarding, it provides enrichment, aids sleep, is a great way to destress an anxious dog, calms the mind, provides mental stimulation, which also helps prevent doggy dementia as dogs age and is just as tiring as a walk, in fact it’s more tiring and offers so much stimulation.
I love watching dogs noses in action! 🤗
[Video was interrupted by a lovely elderly man that likes to stop and chat to us on our walks].
