Identify the 5 senses in Dogs (Smell, Sight, Hearing, Touch, Taste)

Staying with the same dog as living with someone from another culture who speak a different language. Dogs have their own way of communicating different from humans, and we do not always understand what they mean or what they need. One way to adjust to our friends of this is to learn to understand more about how they see the world around them. In addition to a different way of communicating, dogs also see the world with different senses with us. Understanding the dog senses is one step towards a better understanding of our friends and the reason why they do things they usually do.

Let us discuss each of the five senses possessed by a dog, to know better about how the dog felt his world. The five senses owned dogs are:

     - smelling
     - vision
     - hearing
     - touch
     - flavor

 

 

Smelling

 

 

 

While arguably vision is the dominant sense for humans, the olfactory beat all the other senses in the world of dogs.

Here are some facts about the sense of smell for dogs :
 

   - Dogs have 20 times the number of smell receptors in their noses than humans

   - Dogs can detect odors up to one hundred million times more concentrated than human 

 

(for example, some dogs can detect human scent on glass layer slightly touched people and left outside for two weeks).

Olfactory Lobe dog, which is a part of the brain responsible for capturing messages smell, essentially larger than the human olfactory lobe. In addition, they have an organ in their nose called the vomeronasal organ or VNO is used to detect pheromones, or chemical signals, from other animals and humans. Using an incredible sense of smell, dogs can identify, such as determining who or what and who ever is in a particular location, and even how the feeling felt by people or animals at the time. Moreover, dogs can smell bombs and explosives with more accurate than human-made bomb detectors, such as mass spectrometers. Other studies show that trained dogs can detect diabetes, seizure disorders and even certain types of cancer in humans with accuracy of 80% to 100%. Understanding canine olfactory sense can help us to understand why dogs sometimes takes 10 minutes while sniffing a spot on the grass while walking around and why dogs always insist to greet and sniff each other. It can also help us to appreciate how remarkable sense of smell dogs.

 

Vision

Many think that dogs only see in black and white. This is not true. Dogs can see color, but not as much as could be seen by humans. Normal vision has three sub-systems in humans, namely distinguishing light-dark, yellow-blue and red-green. Color blindness occurs due to deficiency in one or two sub-systems. Dog the same eyesight as red green color blind conditions in humans. Thus the visual world dogs are mainly made of gray, blue and yellow.

In addition, the dog can not see the detail as humans. In contrast, dogs have better night vision than us. Eyes dogs have rod cells / stem cells more than the human eye. Rod cells are useful cell receptor during the eye to see objects that are black and white as well as a role on the dark area or dark eyes are seeing. Dogs also have a better ability to detect motion and lets in low light than humans. This may help explain why dogs insist stared out the window of the house after dark night, when you can not see anything interesting out there, the dog may be able to see something you can not see.

Hearing

Similarly, the smell, the sense of hearing dogs defeated of human hearing, but with some conditions. It was thought that the dog has super hearing. In fact, dogs and humans heard the same thing but with some important differences.

Dogs can hear sounds in the ultrasonic range, about two octaves higher than humans can hear. Therefore, the dog could hear some noise (eg a dog whistle) while humans can not. In evolutionary, adapting these properties beneficial for dogs in capturing prey. For example, mice communicate with the higher octave sounds that are not normally detectable by humans. If the dog managed to catch this prey (mice) in the wild, it is because they use their hearing ability to hear their prey.

In addition, dogs can detect and simplify sound and distinguish more accurately than the human voice. For example, if the dog was taken to a very noisy bar, they will be easier to capture the sound and simplify each sound source is in the noise compared to humans. Understanding hearing dogs can help us to understand the cause of the dog feels uneasy under certain conditions. He might hear something that we can not hear.

 

Touch

 

While most parts of the human body is sensitive to touch a finger, the most sensitive part of the body of the dog was its snout. Pad is less sensitive than the human hand, and with good reason because the dog uses her feet to walk. On the other hand, a dog's mouth is used more like our hands to explore the world with a touch. Interestingly, one part of the body most sensitive dog is the base of the neck / upper neck, which is where we use touch to guide and improve the behavior of the dog with the collar when training them. This is probably why you see the experts recommend to put the dog over to the top of the neck collar, because this area is more sensitive. Understanding that the muzzle is the most sensitive areas on the body of a dog, can help us to understand the effect of correcting the dog with a firm touch on the nose.

Flavor

 

The taste is one of the senses in which human beings have the ability that goes far beyond the ability of the dog. Simply look at how the dog ate the swallowed food and this seems to be a sense of how low their senses of taste. While humans have about 9,000 detectors taste on their tongues, dogs only have about 2,000 detectors sense. Therefore, they can distinguish between sweet, sour, bitter and salty but not the same as the level of perceived human sense.

Dogs also have a strong dislike of the bitter taste in food, which explains why a product like Bitter Apple can help you lose interest in the things for example dog biting your towel, by spraying Bitter Apple on your towels will make it no longer interested nibbled.
Dogs are also considered as neophilic, which means they like to try new foods and will try to get close to whatever you put in front of them. Not the same as humans, especially children who may need a long time to want to try new foods. For the record, it is important to know that not all human food is either eaten by dogs.