Dog Behavior Explained 
Put an unfamiliar package on the living-room floor, and two dogs might react very differently. One marches straight over, nose first, ready to investigate. The other stops several feet away, stretches his neck toward the box, and takes a careful sniff without moving his paws.…
You come home after petting a friend’s dog, and your own dog immediately knows something’s different. She sniffs your jeans, checks your sleeves, then returns to your knees for a second inspection.…
Dogs have a wonderfully strange idea of a proper introduction. Two dogs meet at the park, exchange a quick glance, and suddenly one is standing nose-deep in the other’s backside.…
You’ve been walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood for fifteen minutes, and your dog finally looks ready to poop. She slows beside a grassy roadside, sniffs one patch, takes three steps forward, and turns around.…
When your dog stops to sniff another dog’s pee, he’s doing more than checking out a bathroom spot. Urine carries chemical signals that can tell dogs something about the animal that left it, making an ordinary patch of grass surprisingly interesting.…
You walk through the door expecting the usual greeting. Your dog trots over, tail wagging, but instead of looking up at your face, he lowers his nose to your hands.…
Researchers have trained dogs to detect certain cancers from breath and urine samples, sometimes with astonishing accuracy. Other experiments have produced results no better than chance. Both findings matter, because the question isn’t simply whether dogs can smell illness, but what they’re detecting and how reliably they can do it.…
You’ve probably heard someone say that dogs can smell fear. Maybe you’ve wondered about it yourself when your dog seems unusually attentive during a difficult moment. The idea sounds almost supernatural, as though dogs can detect emotions we’re trying to hide.…
Inside your dog’s nose, something remarkable happens every time he sniffs. Air carrying tiny odor molecules travels through narrow, winding passages. Some of it enters a specialized chamber near the back of his nose, where millions of sensory cells help detect smells you might never notice.…
You’ve been standing beside the same patch of grass for what feels like five minutes. Your dog has his nose pressed into a spot barely bigger than your hand, and despite your gentle encouragement, he seems to have no intention of leaving.…