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Internal Parasites In Dogs And Cats Article
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The Amazing Sense Of Smell Of Dogs
from: Kyle BesserThe canine nose has 20 times as many primary receptor cells as the human nose. How all of this works to detect odors is one of the great scientific wonders. Studies on a number of species have found that different regions of the mucous lining within the nose have different chemical properties, more readily absorbing chemicals of one particular molecular shape or another or preferentially absorbing in one region chemicals that are more water soluble and in another chemicals that are more fat soluble.
The ability of the nose to make precise chemical distinctions is truly extraordinary. Some pairs of chemicals that exist in nature are identical in every way. They are made up of exactly the same elements, joined together in exactly the same sequence, except that one is the three-dimensional mirror image of the other. Such "stereoisomers" frequently have a dramatically different odor, indicating that the nose can sort them out by their complex shape alone. The molecule carvone, for example, has the odor of caraway in one of its stereoisomers and the odor of oil of spearmint in its mirror-image form.
Measurements of the acuity of the dog's nose suggest that the dog is many times more sensitive than humans to the presence of minute quantities of odor molecules in the air, but the data are all over the map. This is probably, in part, because the threshold for detecting different chemicals no doubt varies dramatically according to the particular chemical involved. Some comparative studies have found that dogs can detect certain organic chemicals at concentrations a hundred times less than people are able to. For other compounds, the dog's advantage may be a factor of a million or more. In police and security work, dogs can detect the odor from natural gas leaks, concealed narcotics, explosives, and currency, at levels far below the threshold at which humans can detect the odor.
In controlled studies dogs could detect human scent on a glass slide that had been lightly fingerprinted and then left outdoors for as long as two weeks or indoors for as long as a month. The dog could pick which of six identical steel tubes had been held in the hands of a person for no more than five seconds; they could distinguish between T-shirts worn by two identical twins who ate different foods or by two non-identical twins who lived in exactly the same environment and ate exactly the same foods.
More than the remarkable sensitivity to trace odors, it is their ability to pick out particular odors from a variety of competing smells and to match and distinguish them that is the dog's most impressive olfactory feat. This ability is surely a reflection of the dog's superior olfactory computing powers, for it requires not just smelling but analyzing. Dogs have no innate interest in the smell of people, narcotics or money, but if trained repeatedly to focus on certain categories of smells, they can perform amazing feats of cross matching.
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