Why do dogs sniff all over the place?
When it comes to dogs, the nose knows! Dogs sniff to identify things, people, other animals, food and places using their extremely discriminating and sensitive sense of smell. A dog's nose contains 220 million smell-sensitive cells. Human noses have only 5 million. Dogs' survival in nature required them to be able to detect the scent of food as well as the scent of danger; their lives literally hinged on the dependability of their acute sense of smell.
Domestic dogs have inherited this smell sense-ability, and we human owners can greatly benefit from their amazing olfactory perception. Besides Bloodhounds, which are without peer for trailing and tracking missing people and criminals, many other breeds of dogs are used to do important nose work. Dogs are used to find lost people, drugs, bombs, arson accelerants, termites and even skin cancer cells, to name a few. For specific scent discrimination, there is no tool available to humans more efficient than a dog.
So never get angry at a "nosey dog," but consider teaching it to sniff on command! Teaching the dog to find specific scent objects or people can be great fun and will reduce the dog's unprompted sniffing behaviors.
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