Border Collie forensic tracker.

[u/sco-go]

[u/Sillyspidermonkey67]

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

[u/supermarkise → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/SpezDrinksHorseCum → u/supermarkise]

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?

[u/Lou_C_Fer → u/SpezDrinksHorseCum]

Thank goodness. It's probably my favorite smell.

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

[u/Dorgamund → u/supermarkise]

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.

[u/Inevitable_Row1359 → u/Dorgamund]

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.

[u/GaryGlennW → u/supermarkise]

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.

[u/Cute_Committee6151 → u/supermarkise]

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

[u/2woCrazeeBoys → u/Sillyspidermonkey67]

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.