A dog’s nose knows.
A dog’s nose is a work of art, an organ that’s evolved to be an incredibly sensitive to a wide variety of odors. Dogs put their noses in all sorts of places, many of which we find disgusting or offensive but that’s what it’s like to be a dog and we have to accept that’s how they sense their world. Not allowing dogs to sniff can be seen as a form of sensory deprivation that robs them of vital information they need to navigate their surroundings including odors from the mouth, ears, and other areas of the body including those very special private parts of other dogs, other animals, humans, and yes, pee, poop, and a wide variety of stinky stuff they crave and savor and we find utterly revolting.
It always surprises me when I talk with people about dog behavior and what they think is well known and supported by scientific research. One phrase I often hear goes something like, “Dogs smell our moods, especially fear, and they too get leery and uneasy.” I catch myself sometimes saying this to people, but I realize that we don’t really “know” this from any sort of scientific research. However, a good deal of citizen science has clearly alerted me and others that this could be something real.
It’s always good when our intuitions are supported by research, and a new study conducted by Biagio D’Aniello and his colleagues published in the journal Animal Cognition called “Interspecies transmission of emotional information via chemosignals: from humans to dogs (Canis lupus familiaris)” confirms what many have “known,” namely that dogs do smell human fear using chemosignals and they too get scared. The original research report isn’t available online, but an apt summary and a complete list of references are provided.
Dr. D’Aniello and his team studied Golden retrievers and Labradors and were interested if human body odors, called chemosignals, produced in the armpits of happy and fearfulmale humans, could be detected by the dogs and how the different odors affected the dogs. During the experiment, the dog’s human (“owner”), a strange human, and an odor dispenser were present in a room where the dogs could move around freely. The three sweaty odors represented fear, happiness, and a control situation in which there was no sweat. The researchers studied how the dogs interacted with their owner, the stranger, and the sweat dispenser and monitored the dog’s heart rate.
Their results can be summarized as follows: “There were fewer and shorter owner directed behaviors and stranger directed behaviors when they were in the ‘happy odor condition’ compared to the fear odor and control conditions. In the fear odor condition, they displayed more stressful behaviors. The heart rate data in the control and happy conditions were significantly lower than in the fear condition. Our findings suggest that interspecies emotional communication is facilitated by chemosignals.”
I hope that the complete research paper will soon be available online, but a very useful summary of this research project is provided by Jake Buehler in an essay published in New Scientist titled “Dogs really can smell your fear, and then they get scared too.” He writes, “Dogs exposed to fear smells showed more signs of stress than those exposed to happy or neutral smells. They also had higher heart rates, and sought more reassurance from their owners and made less social contact with strangers.”
via The Bark http://ift.tt/2zGAbz6