Why Does My Dog… Sniff Me So Much?

If you got most of your sensory information through your nose, you’d sniff everything, too!

Dogs are impressive in their abilities to suss out the world through their sense of smell. Not only do they have 25 times the number of olfactory receptors we do, by some measures their sense of smell is considered thousands of times more acute than ours. For example, a dog can detect a drop of blood in a gallon of water, and some dogs can determine whether humans have bladder cancer by simply sniffing their urine.

So when you get home from a long day away only to be treated as if you’ve rolled in sausage, don’t be annoyed. Rather, consider that he’s merely making a mental map of all the places his best friend has been.