Doggie Grab Bag

“I can do anything better than you”
Dogs see, hear, and smell better than you do!

SIGHTS   Contrary to popular belief, dogs are not color blind. Scientists now know, however, that dogs can’t see the color red very well. Dogs with long noses, like the Labrador retriever and the vizsla, have a visual streak across the retinas of their eyes that gives them a wide field of vision of up to 270 degrees (compared to 180 degrees for humans). Dogs with short noses, like the beagle or the pug, have an area centralis, a patch with three times the density of nerve endings as the visual streak. These dogs have detailed sight that is more like that of a human being.

SOUNDS   Dogs can hear sounds at both a lower pitch and a much higher pitch than humans. Because dogs can move their ears, they can pinpoint the location of a sound quickly. As many as 18 muscles can tilt, rotate, or raise and lower a dog’s ear. A dog can hear sounds coming from up to four times as far away as humans can. Dogs with floppy ears do not hear quite as well as dogs with ears that stick up like a fox’s ears.

SMELLS    Dogs have more than 200 million smell-sensitive cells covering an area about the size of an envelope, compared to some five million over an area the size of a postage stamp for human beings. Dogs are more adept at sniffing and following ground scents than scents in the air. People who train tracking dogs say it’s impossible to train a dog to track by smell any better than it does naturally. Instead, their job is to motivate the dog and teach it to maintain its focus on a single track, ignoring any others that might get in the way. A dog’s intensive search for a scent, for example, sniffing for drugs in airport luggage, is incredibly tiring.