Ep. 445: Houndations – How to Truly Understand Your Dog’s Sniffer to be a Better Trainer and Owner

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Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation’s podcast. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about understanding how good our dogs noses really are and how they use them, and how we can make sure that once we understand that, we can be better trainers and just better dog owners. If you talk to I don’t know literally any dog owner anywhere, or at least bird dog owner, you’ll probably hear them talk about their dogs having a really good nose. I used to think that was a thing, like, you know, some dogs have a good nose and some dogs don’t. Now I think I was mostly wrong. I would bet that the worst dog nose out there isn’t too shabby, and that the dogs we think have bad noses mostly just don’t know what they’re doing or care about what they are doing. Now, while it’s cool to think about how they view the world through their sniffers, understanding how good they really are is important to training and just general dog ownership. That’s what I’m going to talk about right now. My favorite writer to ever live is a fellow named Cormac McCarthy. You’ve probably heard of him. You know a lot of folks have read his stuff, and if not. You’ve probably seen a movie or two based on his books. The most popular of these is probably No Country for Old Men, but he also wrote The Road and All the Pretty Horses. The last book, which is the first of a trilogy, is set in the American Southwest and on down into Old Mexico, and it follows a couple of young cowboys looking to hold on to the only lifestyle they know or want to be a part of, which is ranching now. In the second book of the series, The Crossing, which is about as haunting of a work of fiction as you’re likely to read if you’re so inclined, The first one hundred pages are so involved a boy trying to trap a wild wolf. At one point, McCarthy switches perspectives to describe the wolf crossing the landscape and then encountering a whole bunch of different scents, one of which is another wolf that stops at dead in his tracks. It’s some of the best writing out there, and the way that he describes how the wolf perceives the world through its nose is just so damn intuitive. Now, I don’t want to say anything more than that, because if you’re ever inclined to read it or the whole Border trilogy. I’m honestly jealous of you to get to experience it for the first time. Now. The reason that that part of the Crossing stuck with me so hard is because canines in their noses are just fascinating to me, and I think it’s one of those things that we can’t really even begin to understand. We can try, though, or sometimes we just try to kind of explain it away. One of my favorite things to argue with people on the dog and the deer hunting front is how much they key on breath as a primary scent. Now, this works for dogs and deer hunters talking about trying to beat a deer’s nose, So bear with me here. Now, I’ve talked to a lot of deer hunters, and I’ve talked to a lot of bird dog owners who swear that breath is the primary source of scent. But I disagree. I’ve watched a hell of a lot of deer in my life, and if you touch a gait or a branch or a blade of grass, they’ll often walk up and sniff everywhere, including both sides of a blade of grass. It’s hard to imagine that there would be a difference in their incent but they must believe it to be possible, because you can see that stuff happen a lot. I also think that if you died in your tree standing, your respiratory system wasn’t working anymore. Every dear the walk down wind if you would smell you anyway. Now, deer are not dogs, and they use their noses for different things kinda. They do have a similar amount of scent receptors, at least close enough to really not matter to us a whole lot about the difference. But in the case of your lovable setter or pointer or golden doodle or whatever, they are going to sport anywhere from about two hundred and twenty to three hundred million cent receptors in their old schnazes. To give that little context, humans have about five million. What makes that even crazier is to try to understand how the brain process is sent and how many resources in an individual’s anatomy devotes to old factory capabilities. In humans, a long studied, in long debated issue is whether women have a better sense of smell than men. This is an interesting one where science meets social aspects, because the science isn’t super clear one way or the other, though, a lot of research points to women having a little bit better ability to smell stuff. On the social side, I think you could pull one hundred married couples help maybe a million, and about ninety nine point seven percent of them would say without a doubt women have a more acute sense of smell. One study conducted down in Brazil took a look at the brain structures of eighteen men and women who were over the age of fifty five and who were neurologically healthy when they died, and who also had some kind of nose dependent job like being a chef or a coffee taster. What they found during that study is that women have on average forty three percent more cells and fifty percent more neurons that are dedicated specifically to old factor capabilities. So not only is this sort of intuitive reality for a lot of us, but it seems like women generally have a little bit more brain real estate dedicated to sniffing things out compared to men. And why would this be. While some of the theories point to using their noses as being a pretty big asset in pair bonding and mate selection, as well as kin recognition, other theories suggest that throughout much of our evolutionary history, the males often went on the offensive when it came to dangerous stuff and you know, animals, other hominids, whatever, and females were more often on the defensive end. So to put that simply, the earlier danger could be detected, the quicker they could take shelter or run to survive. That’s a pretty hard thing to test for these days, but it’s an interesting theory nonetheless, even if it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with dogs, although that might not be true either given how limited our noses are even factoring in how we probably used to have much better nose is. Urging a wolf to come up to the fire and eat some meat while also relying on its nose to alert to danger would make up for a hell of a lot of our olfactory shortfalls and was very likely a primary driver in our coevolution with canines. Now, A lot of this is fun to think about, but doesn’t really have much bearing on our modern couch potato dogs. Yes and no. To understand how to truly train a dog and to also give it the mental stimulation it needs, then it doesn’t hurt to understand how good their noses are and how their noses work. And just like with the women from that study, dogs have a pretty important amount of their brains dedicated to processing scent. In fact, the part of your dog’s brain that is dedicated specifically to analyzing smells is about forty times larger than a human’s relative to the size difference in our brains. Anyway, what does this do well? It allows them to process a whole lot of information and distinguish odors at a level that is just a total mystery to us, even when you frame it up, like you know, a dog can detect scents in parts per trillion, like a single drop of scent in a dozen and a half Olympic sized swimming pools. It’s kind of like how we can’t really begin to process how big spaces. The numbers just sort of melt into an ungraspable blob. We can sort of understand how dogs have such an advantage over us and a hell of a lot of creatures by digging into their anatomy, you know, specifically to take a look at the Jacobson’s organ Now, to be totally honest here, some humans still have remnants of this organ tucked away in their heads, but it’s non functional. In dogs and some other mammals, as well as some amphibians and reptiles, this organ functions as a chemo receptor that detects heavy moisture born order particles, which is different from airborne odors, which are detected by the sensory cells located in the main nasal chambers. Now this may be a little bit of a weird example to help you understand the Jacobson’s organ, But think of your favorite snake. Now maybe you don’t have one, so think of the snake you hate the most. A definitive and undeniable aspect of danger ropes is that they taste the air with their tongues, but that’s not actually what they are doing. They stick their tongues out, then they’ll wiggle that tongue around, draw it back into their mouth where it’ll mix with fluids and is then delivered to the docks leading to the Jacobsen organ. They take airborne scent, they get it wet, and then filter that through an organ that evolves specifically to parse out the scent and deliver that information to their little snake brains. This organ in dogs is located on the roof of their mouth, and you can actually see it if you know where to look. It’s used for a variety of things, but the most important is that it allows them to parse different pheromones that other dogs give off. This is why when two dogs meet, they often circle each other and stick their noses right into each other’s exhaust pipes. To us, that might be Valentine’s Day behavior after a couple of glasses of wine, but to dogs, it’s the quickest method to deduce the mood of their new acquaintance. Dogs can tell if other dogs are happy or scared, or potentially ready to mate through this move. Now, on the surface, it’s pretty straightforward. If you’re a canine and you can’t verbally say hey, buddy, how are you today and then gauge the response, you want to know what another dog is feeling because your safety depends on it. Like the way a white tailed deer will throw up its tail as it runs from danger to allow other deer the chance to see that flag and follow it to safety. A dog that has another dog that runs by it for some reason, that dog might be running in fear and smelling that fear will allow them have a little bit of an advantage to get away or prepare for that danger. While your dog might never have to use it’s Jacobson’s organ to smell another dog running away from a pack of wolves or some other big critter that might kill him, this still plays a huge role in our modern dogs’ lives. So think about this one. Have you ever owned a dog that is outgoing, you know, super happy in general, but scared shitless of the vet clinic or maybe a doggy daycare. We think that their fear is often tied to a bad experience, because that’s how things work for us. You know, we go to the doctor as a child, and they give us some shots that hurt, and then we get pretty leria going back to the doctor. It would stand a reason that the same thing would be true for dogs, but there’s way more to it than that. Imagine if you pulled up to a strange building and could see people through the windows, you know, running scared or hiding behind desks, and just generally exhibiting obvious fear, you’d be pretty hesitant to go in there. Now, while dogs don’t visually see that fear manifested in other dog’s behaviors, when you pull up to the vet clinic, they can certainly smell it. And if you’re thinking that’s not the same thing, you’re probably wrong. I think it is. I think their noses are the equivalent of our eyes, and they might be able to smell that fear in the parking a lot of the clinic in some instances. And what’s crazier is they can probably smell our apprehension and nervousness when taking them to the vet, knowing they’re probably going to freak out. That’s pretty crazy. But another way to think about it is how capable they are of separating and analyzing the individual parts of scent. An easy way to understand this is to go back to the world of white tailed deer hunting again and think about how often people used to use cover sense. When I first started bow hunting, my dad had bottles of fox urine. The idea was that deer aren’t all that scared of foxes, which isn’t really true because I’ve watched a lot of foxes and quite a few housecats wig them out bad. But anyway, he puts some drops of fox scent on his boots, and the idea that it would cover his human scent when he walked into the stand. Now, over the years, a pile of products have come and gone in this category, which started with a lot of natural sense and eventually ended up with things like Airsol bottles that allowed you to coat your stand tree with vanilla based cover sense to overwhelm a deer’s notes. While I don’t want to give away any trade secrets you know about how they work or whatever, I think it’s pretty obvious how that category of products has, you know, kind of nearly disappeared after enough real world usage by customers who took their money elsewhere. So you can make your decision based on that. Now, what happens with those scents like that fox urine on my dad’s boots is the deer go huh? I smell fox pee and human body odor and leather from their boots and the glue used in the boots and last night’s dinner that soaked into the leather, and on and on. Dogs can do this too, really well, And a good way to think about it is to imagine sitting down to a meal of lasagna Garfield style. We would smell that delicious smell of well lasagna. But a dog can smell the noodles and the different types of cheese, and the different types of meats, and the seasonings and pretty much every part that has an individual scent, and they can process that information in real time, just like if you look into a room and you clearly see the TV and the knickknacks on the TV stand, and the vacuum cleaner on the floor, and the clock on the wall, and well all of the visible stuff that’s right there. Now, I’ll give you one last example here on how good a dog’s nose is before I explain why we should know this and what we should do about it. When you think of search and rescue dogs or disaster rescue dogs, you know, the dogs that are brought in when some hiker goes missing, or when there’s an earthquake and a building collapses and they need to find survivors. Fast dogs are by far one of the best tools to use. You know, even given modern drone technology and the latest and greatest of whatever purpose built tools we have, there are so many situations where a well trained dog’s nose just does the job the best. Now, if you’re paying attention, the well trained part of that is what matters the most. To us. Now, like I said way at the beginning of this, I’m not so sure there are dogs with bad noses, but I’m positive there are dogs that have been trained really well to use their noses for certain tasks. I mean, if you take an English setter that has never hunted grouse and an English Setter that has hunted grouse every fall for six years, you’re not dealing with a big difference in the capabilities of their noses, just practical experience at putting those noses to work. One will do better than the other. And it’s really not up for debate. This is a hard thing for us to train for in certain ways because we are such vision focused creatures. We like watching a retriever swim down a bumper, you know, in the neighborhood pond. But most of what a dog has asked to do, even a duck dog, is use its nose to complete the task. So we not only need to train for that, but understand why training for that is really good for us as owners and good for the dogs. So for the first part, it’s pretty obvious a dog that can smell quail or roosters and then flush them or point them is a dog that is doing a hell a lot of what we want them to do, But we also want them to recover those birds, because without the dog, we won’t find most of them, or at least there are a hell of a lot of situations where we are at a real disadvantage. But we also need to set up training drills to teach them how to use their nose in a variety of situations. And while I’m not a big fan of trying to trick dogs during training, paying attention to how scent plays into it is really important. You don’t want your dog to simply follow your scent during trailing drills, for example, or to key on your hand sent solely while trying to train them to find some shed antlers. You want them to have to use their noses for the task the way it’ll play out in the field, And that means if you knock a rooster down in the CRP, there won’t be a super easy to follow scent trail of a human going up to it. Just like a buck out there who shakes his head and drops his rack on the ground, you know he’s not going to figure out how to put some human handsent on those antlers to help your dog find them quicker. There are a ton of ways to encourage the right use of their noses, from trying to eliminate as much scent as possible through ozone, to using dummy launchers to put a bumper way out in the field nowhere near where you’ve walked recently. Or you can put out bumpers or dead birds a day or two before actually training on them to allow some of the scent to dissipate. Now, this isn’t something you’d want to do with an eight week old puppy, but an older dog that is getting into the serious stages of training will benefit greatly from you working to at least force him to use his nose, you know, kind of the way they’re supposed to and the way they’re going to have to out in the field. Now, the best part of this, besides the fact that it hel helps dogs become better at the jobs we want them to be good at, is that mental health wise, it’s a huge win for them. They have a long, long history of using their noses for tasks and to achieve rewards like a full belly or a safe night in the den, and that hasn’t gone away. A dog that gets to use its nose for tasks and to earn rewards as a dog, that will be happier and often a little more calm around the house. And who doesn’t want that? So think about that. Think about your dog’s nose and how to make sure that your dog learns how to use it correctly, and you help them with that path along the way. Well, that’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Houndation’s podcast. As I always, thank you so much for listening and for all of your support all of us here at Mediator do we truly appreciate it. Without you, guys, we are nothing, so thank you for that. Now, if you want a little bit more content, or hell a lot more content, you can head on over to the medeater dot com and check out a ton of stuff we drop new films, new videos, new podcasts, new articles, new recipes, all kinds of stuff over there at the mediator dot com. You can get your fill of entertainment and education. Go check it out and thanks again.