The Five Dog Senses

We’ve all heard that a dog’s sense of smell is much better than ours, but what about the other four senses?  For years, people have said that dogs only see in black and white, but it turns out that’s a wives’ tale.  Dogs can actually see in a spectrum from black to green to blue to grey, as well as creams and white.  In comparison, humans sees more than 7 million different shades and hues.  However…

dogs definitely have us beat when it comes to seeing motion and seeing at night.  They can detect just the slightest movement and they have an extra reflective layer in their eyes.  This extra layer reflects light back onto the receptive cells of their eyes, giving them good vision in low light and that creepy glow you can see when a dog or cat stares through a dark room.

Dogs also have much better hearing than we do.  They can hear sounds from four times further away than we can, and they have 15 muscles on each side just to move their ears.  They can point one ear independently or both ears at the same time to locate and zone in on sounds.

A dog’s sense of touch is NOT as well developed as ours is.  That’s why they have to sit practically on top of you in order to feel safe and cuddled. 

As far as their sense of taste, we all know that our dogs eat some pretty disgusting things.  And they often eat them so fast, they don’t even take time to chew!  This may lead you to think they can’t tell what things taste like.  This is far from the truth.  Just as in humans, the sense of taste is heavily influenced by the sense of smell.  So, it is likely that dogs DO have the ability to discriminate between different tastes.  Apparently, they just don’t care!

And, in case you were wondering about the sense of smell thing:  humans have around 40 million receptors in their noses.  Dogs have a whopping 2 billion!  So, here’s my question:  why do they have to get their noses so close to the other dogs’ butts?

Until next time,

Good day, and good dog!

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