Читать книгу Collins Good Dog Behaviour: An Owner’s Guide - Gwen Bailey - Страница 19

One of the first things a dog will do in a new environment is to put his nose to the floor and sniff. A human in the same situation would look around. A dog when meeting another dog or a person will, characteristically, sniff them, sometimes in the most embarrassing, but smelliest, places. A human (fortunately!) will just look. Both are gathering information about their world, but the way in which they do it illustrates one of the most important differences between them. We live in a very visual world, whereas dogs live in a very smelly one.

Their sense of smell is incredible by our standards. Not only do they have many more cells in their nose for detecting different smells (the area used for smell detection is fourteen times the size of ours), but these cells are of better quality and the part of their brain that receives the information is considerably more developed. This allows dogs to detect and identify a much wider variety of scents at much lower concentrations.

Dogs gather a lot of information by sniffing at places in a territory which have been marked by other dogs.

Smells on the ground need careful investigation.

Using this ability enables them to acquire much more information in one sniff than we can ever imagine. Going for a walk and sniffing the scents left behind by other dogs must be like watching a video of all those who have passed by in the past few days. Information such as sex, health and social standing may be passed on through urine and faeces. This allows most male dogs, and some females, to advertise their presence and status by marking every available lamppost and clump of grass.

Although we cannot even begin to understand what it is like to be able to detect odours in the same way as our dogs do, knowing that they live in a different sensory world can help us to understand them better. It helps to explain some of their peculiar habits, such as sniffing everything they come into contact with, kicking up earth with their back hind legs after going to the toilet (they have scent glands in between their pads), and rolling in substances that we would rather they did not.