Dogs Can “Smell” Your Mood
Our domestic dogs spend most of their time observing us so well that they are masters in reading and understanding our body language and facial expressions. Thus, our dogs can easily tell if we are upset or in a good mood by the size of our pupil, our smile or even our posture.
Dogs can also detect high levels of stress in humans by using their sense of smell, by sensing the chemosignals we emit.
Dogs Can Detect Pregnancy
Our dogs would also be able to detect that a woman is pregnant - or at least that a significant change has occurred in her body - by smelling a change in her body odor linked to hormonal changes that she suffers.
Besides olfactory cues, dogs are keen observers who can also perceive changes in a pregnant woman's lifestyle or behavior. Thus, changes in the schedule of his masters or a reorganization of the house for the arrival of a baby can disrupt a dog's routine and make him "feel" that a change is near.
Dogs can predict future seizures
Dogs, thanks to their ultra-developed sense of smell, are able to prevent hypoglycemia attacks in people with diabetes. Variations in blood sugar can indeed modify the smell of breath and sweat, odors that trained dogs are able to detect.
Even more amazing: some dogs can be trained to become seizure detection dogs. They can thus alert their master of the imminence of a crisis so that he can get to safety before it occurs.
The power to detect epileptic seizures is more mysterious because, for the time being, we do not know of any change in body odor associated with this type of seizure. Seizure-detecting dogs may thus be sensitive to subtle changes in behavior and body language that may precede a seizure rather than a change in body odor.
Dogs can “smell” the storm
Has your dog ever hid behind the sofa when a storm is brewing? He starts moaning and seems more nervous than usual before a thunderstorm breaks out?
The ability of dogs to sense upcoming thunderstorms is a phenomenon for which scientists have advanced several theories.
Among these hypotheses, dogs could thus perceive drops in barometric pressure thanks to their whiskers (or whiskers) which are real sensory sensors as well as the variations in ozone concentration that occur during a storm.
They could also quite simply, thanks to their highly developed hearing, hear the storm coming from far away long before it reaches our ears.
Dogs can smell cancer
It's no secret: dogs have such fine olfactory abilities that some of them are able to detect the presence of cancer cells very early, even before they are detectable by modern means of medical imaging.
Thus, dogs would be able to detect various forms of cancer such as ovarian, lung, prostate or breast cancer.
Various research programs are currently working on new detection techniques for these diseases based on canine odorology, like the KDog project led by the Institut Curie.