Dog sniffs- processing info? What info?
I’ve always seen it said that when dogs are sniffing, they are processing information. Are they really though?? what kind of information?? like it’s not possible they’re leaving each other messages right? are they telling each other that “hey just fyi, I don’t like cats” or what possible information could they be learning from another dogs pee??
In: Biology
A typical dog’s nose is 100,000 to 1 million times more sensitive than a human’s. Some dog’s noses are up to 10 million times more sensitive.
In visual terms, that’s like being able to fit an encyclopedia on a postage stamp. We have the ability to fit that much information in that space, but we need technology to do so in a meaningful way. If someone could see that well, they’d be able to see details you wouldn’t pick out, and you’d think they were looking at nothing interesting, just like it seems like dogs are smelling uninteresting things.
So, yes, they really can tell a lot of information just from smell.
How much they process that information is somewhat dubious, because they cannot tell us, because they cannot speak, but they definitely do access and use some of the information, because we can observe them smelling things and reacting to the smells.
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