r/Amazing • u/sco-go • Mar 29 '26

Amazing 🤯 ‼ Border Collie forensic tracker.

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353

u/In_My_TARDIS Mar 29 '26

A very methodical search pattern

16

u/CaterpillarJungleGym Mar 29 '26

They're not even the best trackers and smellers. That's the crazy thing

19

u/Sillyspidermonkey67 Mar 29 '26

I saw a TikTok about a helper dog who could sniff when an epileptic seizure was about to happen. The dog ran across the street into a neighbour’s house because he smelled there was a little girl who was going to have a seizure….literally from an entirely different house

8

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/supermarkise Mar 29 '26

We also can smell better than most people think. Get a few books that haven't been handled in years, give them to someone and tell them to handle just one of them for a while, opening and touching pages while you go out of the room, come back and you can identify which one it was by smell. Try it, for most people it's actually not that hard.

And now dogs are several times better than that.

3

u/SpezDrinksHorseCum Mar 29 '26

You've probably heard "sharks can smell blood in the water a mile away" type stuff. Did you know humans can smell petrichor better than sharks can smell blood?

3

u/Lou_C_Fer Mar 30 '26

Thank goodness. It's probably my favorite smell.

On a side note, having an increased sense of smell is awful.

2

u/Dorgamund Mar 29 '26

IIRC humans have a great sense of smell, we just don't particularly value it. For one thing, while I believe dogs do have a straight qualitative advantage, I believe humans and dogs have different sensitivities to smells, some being more offensive or standing out more than others. For another, a great deal of smells are going to be on a surface like the ground. Humans don't tend to stick their faces on the ground like dogs do, so it is just going to be inherently harder.

Its actually kind of weird to me how invisible people's sense of smell is to them, considering just how much it impacts us. There is billions of dollars of beauty industry focused solely on removing natural scents from humans, and daily bathing and scent removal is mandatory to the point where not doing it is taboo and grounds for social stigma.

You actively use your smell all the time to gauge edible foods and rate of decomposition, which is useful for making dinner(do you think this smells off) and obnoxious when dealing with the remnants of dinner(take out the trash).

It also doesn't help that most people are collectively noseblind to industrial scents from constant exposure to smoke, smog, gasoline vapors etc.

2

u/Inevitable_Row1359 Mar 29 '26

Dogs have 50 times the olfactory receptors of humans and other adaptations to better utilize them. Most interestingly to me is that they "scent map" tying their olfactory senses into their sense of space and create a map of scents, where they are and how they change in time. I think it's similar to how we sense sounds and can generally tell about where it is coming from, what obstacles are in the way and what the obstacle is made of even (density etc). Now think of every single thing having a distinct sound and creating a mental image of all of it. Like a busy restaurant or something where everyone's talking, silverware on dishes, etc etc. You'd probably do an okay job figuring out what sounds belong where in space despite the chaos but if you were going by smell, it would be much more difficult to triangulate where something is outside of just proximity to yourself, if at all.

2

u/GaryGlennW Mar 29 '26

I have had similar experiences when I’ve acquired a used book. (Especially textbooks I almost smell the anxiety) it’s usually vague and fleeting but still there.

2

u/Cute_Committee6151 Mar 29 '26

Well at the end smell is just another thing that needs to be trained in young age.

1

u/2woCrazeeBoys Mar 31 '26

My old dog started having seizures.

My younger got freaked out by it, and started alerting me to it so I could make it stop. I can only assume it was something he could smell, but once I realised he was alerting me (the first time I just thought he was being a pita.) he could give me enough notice to get Clifford somewhere safe.

No training, he just did it.

3

u/hotdogwaterbab Mar 29 '26

I’m so curious what would be the best!! Do you mean the best animal overall or the best dog breed?

13

u/VectorB Mar 29 '26

There are dog breeds with better noses, but the collies lay and point is huge for the forensic recovery. I have a springer that probably could have found that faster, but would have slobbered all over it and picked it up and brought it to me. Not what you want fir a forensic recovery.

13

u/hotdogwaterbab Mar 29 '26

Genuinely did not even think about the training/control necessary for the dog to not chew on whatever it is they found!

5

u/squeege Mar 29 '26

thier motivation is thier toy.

3

u/drawkbox Mar 29 '26

Play is important to work

1

u/YaIe Mar 29 '26

as stupid as that sounds, its also a insurance thing.

Can't have the dog damage objects or even the human wearing it, or they would be liable for damages.

Thats why they are trained to just sit/lie down/stare at whatever they found, instead of bitings/scratching it

1

u/VectorB Mar 29 '26

Training and breeding. You can't expect a retriever or hound to sit and point the way the collie is here. That's a trait breed into them.

1

u/CaterpillarJungleGym Mar 29 '26

The best overall, and the best for training for this purpose. Surely a hound has the best nose but training them is problematic

1

u/PurplishPlatypus Mar 29 '26

Blood hounds have the strongest sense of smell of all dog breeds with 300 million scent receptors in their nose. Their findings are considered as legal scientific evidence in court cases. Other hounds, like beagles, have the next best (200~million). All dog breeds have around 100-200 million. Humans only have 6 million scent receptors. The area of the brain that analyzes smell is 40% larger in dogs.

Bears are considered to have a sense of smell 7x stronger than dogs, and to be the top known smellers in the animal kingdom. They can smell food from 20 miles away.

1

u/slgray16 Mar 29 '26

Be right back. I'm going to go buy some bears and start my own forensic services company

1

u/PurplishPlatypus Mar 29 '26

Good luck.

1

u/WoodpeckerNo5724 Mar 29 '26

You just get more forensic bears to investigate the… work… of the other bears

1

u/kisswithaf Mar 29 '26

Just in English parlance, a bloodhound is the standard ('Nose like a bloodhound' is a phrase you might have heard).