To say that dogs have a notion of time similar to that of humans may be exaggerated; or maybe not, but so far it has not been scientifically proven. However, there are some experiments that give some idea of how dogs could experience the passage of time. Specifically, this field test conducted on a BBC program relates the perception of dogs’ time to the smell of their owner. The explanation of the video is detailed in the following paragraphs.
Every day at the same time Jazz jumps to the couch, he knows that in about 20 minutes his owner will come home. It seems that the dog really knows what time it is. One option is to think that it is a routine and the dog knows, because it happens every day, that time after the arrival of his human always comes his human.
The researchers, however, believe that it may have something to do with the fine sense of the smell of dogs. It is like an hourglass, in olfactory version: when the smell of your human has dispersed from the house to a certain level, Jazz knows that it is the moment when its owner has to return.
And there is the experiment-test: its owner brings t-shirts that stink her husband and moves them around the house, leaving them on the sofa, etc. The result is that just that day Jazz … does not get on the couch and does not go out to receive its owner! Although it has no scientific value, the test is revealing, although ethologists tend to think that the smell would not be the only factor that marks the notion of dogs’ time. The luminosity, the circadian rhythms that we have all the animals, etc. would be added.
Anyway, the smell of dogs is light years from ours in terms of finesse and ability to capture and distinguish different odors.
His is between 10,000 and 100,000 times more sensitive than ours. It is as if they saw with the nose; This is how the powerful smell of dogs is usually described, an smell capable of detecting diseases, bedbugs, bombs, drugs … and of course, the smell of its human, the most delicious, with the permission of bacon.
We can distinguish the smell of a perfume in a room, but a dog could do it in a closed football stadium and would even be able to distinguish the different elements that make up the perfume. In addition, smelling a certain object, such as the trunk of a tree or a lamppost where other dogs have urinated, can know who and when it has passed through there, as well as its size, health status, etc. That is, they can see the past.
Why dogs sniff their asses
Once established that our dogs have an olfactory vision unthinkable for humans, we can intuit that the ass of their peers contains a lot of information of interest, as a kind of cover letter. That is the reason that dogs sniff each other’s asses when they meet, even if they already know each other previously.
The fault of this source of information is the anal glands, which secrete numerous substances useful to establish a kind of chemical communication. It allows dogs to discover many things. By sniffing like this their peers can find out their gender, their diet and even their mood.
The anal gland is actually two glands, the apocrine sweat (responsible for the smell of dogs) and the sebaceous. And both are the cause of the differences in the smell between one can and another, or in the same can at different times of his life. In addition, dogs have an additional smell system, the Jacobson Organ, designed precisely to detect pheromones and everything related to chemical communication that goes beyond normal odors.