Thursday, October 11, 2018

Col. Potter training tip: The nose knows

“What do dogs have that we don't? For one thing, they possess up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to about six million in us. And the part of a dog's brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is, proportionally speaking, 40 times greater than ours.”
Since a dog's nose is tens of thousands of times as sensitive to odors as ours, it shouldn’t be surprising that our dogs may not appreciate the chemical air fresheners or even essential oil and candle fragrances we use in our homes. This may be a health issue for asthmatic dogs, but for most of our canine pals it can simply be an issue of preference. Do you want to force your dog, whose sense of smell may be up to 100,000 times as acute as yours, to live with a holiday pine scent if it interferes with the normal everyday scents (of you, for instance)? And what if he just doesn’t like the smell of pines? Would you even know?

Let’s try a little test. Remove the air fresheners, essential oil diffusers, scented candles, and other fragrances from all the rooms in your house. Give your air a chance to clear. And then add the fragrance dispenser in one room, and see if your dog avoids that room or nestles in it. That should give you some indication of your dog’s preferences.

My Westie, Peaches, even sniffs the concrete Pan during her morning garden strolls.

The scent issue also includes our cleaning supplies. I recently got a question from a friend who wondered why her dogs’ “rituals” changed.
“Syd and Logan eat at 4:30, then I eat and they just hang. I then share a chocolate chip cookie with them for my dessert. Syd then falls asleep and Logan lays near the window and looks out. This has been our ritual for 5 years. Now, after chocolate chip cookie time, Logan goes upstairs, lays on the futon. Been going on for 2 weeks. ??????”
I thought this was an interesting conundrum. “Does Logan seem sad, or is he matter-of-fact about it?” I asked. “Did something change outside to make it less interesting? Or, HAVE YOU CLEANED YOUR WINDOWS? (My door window is so smeared with dog stuff that it's impossible to see out, LOL!)”

My friend realized that she changed her window cleaning product two weeks prior, the same time Logan changed his ritual. She had cleaned that window, but not the window upstairs by the futon. She has now changed back to the original cleaner, but Logan has evidently decided he likes the futon, regardless. Was Logan talking with his feet, telling my friend that he didn't like the new smell?
“For humans, smell is a second-tier sense that we use to enjoy food and horribly artificial air fresheners. For a dog, smell is the dominant sense – it rules their world in a way we humans and our puny olfactory abilities simply can’t comprehend.”

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