The dogs secret weapon - Their Snout!

Dogs have exceptional noses! They have around 300 million specialised olfactory receptors, us humans have a mere 5 million. This helps dogs detect scents that we simply can’t.

Dogs can be trained to pick out specific scents, they can literally sniff out around one -billionth of a teaspoon.

Over the last 100 years dogs have been highly trained by the army and police to detect drugs, bombs and explosives. Search & rescue to detect human scent. More recently dogs and their snouts have been trained to detect types of cancer and other disease odours. Research by Medical Detection Dogs shows that incredibly they can detect the equivalent of a teaspoon of sugar diluted by the water of 2 Olympic sized swimming pool.

I love to use some scent games in my training, dogs find this so rewarding. It really does help to open more processing doors in their brains, releasing lovely dopamine.

Dopamine is super important in reward based training, it is a neurotransmitter in the brain and has an important role in motivation. When we reward our dogs for a behaviour, dopamine is released this motivates our dogs to make them more likely to repeat this behaviour in the future.

Sniffing out delicious treats, releasing dopamine, helping our dogs feel motivated, making training fun and rewarding with positive learning outcomes.

Cortisol is a hormone which is released when dogs are stressed ( also when punishment led training is used ), we see our dogs going over their threshold, unable to think clearly and not in control of what they are doing.

Sniffing out treats can help bring these cortisol levels down, dopamine motivating them to seek out rewards allowing the stress to reduce and their bodies come back to normal thus promoting a calmer response.

The dogs nose really is something else !