How Does Your Dog Smell?

No, I’m not blogging about canine olfactory processes. I’ll leave that to Ken over at Did a Cat Sh*t in Here.

I’d like to talk about how you recognize and judge the scent of your four-legged friend.

Back in 2000, Queens University psychologists Deborah Wells and Peter Hepper published a study in Perception titled The discrimination of dog odours by humans. The study examined the ability of humans to identify individual dogs by smell. From the abstract:

Most of the participants (88.5%) were
able to recognise the odour of their own dog. They showed no
significant bias, however, in responding which of the odours they
thought smelt the strongest or most pleasant. The results indicate that
dogs produce odours that are individually distinctive to their owners,
and highlight the fact that humans can recognise members of another
species using olfactory cues — an ability presumably acquired without
conscious effort.

Even though the importance of our sense of smell has historically
been grossly underestimated, we’ve known for some time that humans,
like other mammals, can discriminate between kin and non‐kin by
olfactory cues alone – so these findings shouldn’t be terribly
surprising. Still, after stumbling onto the abstract I was curious to
know more. Since the article is only available (at least to me) by
paid subscription, I thought it was a wonderful stroke of luck that
Scientific American published an article about it
just this week. Here’s their description of the study and an
interesting side note on the results not included in the abstract:

In this study, twenty-six dog owners
were given a blanket to place in their dog’s bed for a period of three
consecutive nights. (One rule was that the dogs couldn’t be bathed for
at least a month before the study began.) The owners then returned to
the laboratory with this blanket, were blindfolded, and asked to take a
deep whiff of two comparison blankets. One blanket was from their own
dog’s bed and the other was from the bed of a foreign dog matched for
age, sex, and (wherever possible) breed. Remarkably, 88.5% (23 of the
26 participants) correctly identified their own dog’s odor—a finding
that the authors attribute to familiarization. However, somewhat
surprisingly, the study failed to show that owners preferred this
particular smell over the other one.

So… pet owners can differentiate the scent of their dogs from those
of strange dogs (which is, by the way, not the same thing as being able
to identify our dogs by smell) - but we don’t necessarily preferour dogs’ odors. Why not? Well first, as SciAm noted:

One possible reason for this null
finding on the preference dimension may be that the study did not
control for quality of attachment between the owner and his or her dog.

They probably also didn’t control for variations in personal or
cultural attitudes toward odor or for factors affecting the general
aesthetic quality of the odor of the dog (i.e., gingivitis, skin
problems, flatulence, ear infections etc.) Pheromones may be an
important factor as well. While we may recognize and/or be attracted
to the body odors of potential mates and our offspring, it would make
evolutionary sense that we wouldn’t necessarily respond positively to
the pheromones or body odors of an animal of another species – even one
that we care deeply for.

I enjoy the smells of my dogs (for the most part at least) and I’ve
always been able to tell them apart by scent. Just for you I very
carefully and methodically smelled both my dogs about the head,
shoulders and hips so I could report what they smell like. Zip has a
very soft, light, powdery (and very undoglike) scent with hints of
lemon and ear wax. This is her scent, not her shampoo – she
hasn’t had a bath in several months (and no, I don’t use doggy
colognes). Audie has a much stronger, saltier scent with an earwax
topnote and basenotes of intact boy dog urine and raw meat.

I have to say that even though Audie is my darling mamma’s boy, I much prefer Zip’s scent to his.