Dogs’ conception of time is complicated. Many dogs can correctly forecast future occurrences, which is why they run toward the door to look out when the kids are about to arrive home from school or when the grownups are almost home from work.
Why is it so? If dogs do not belong to a mysterious world and they are unable to check the clock or count the hours? Here, we’ll look at a dog’s sense of smell and why they seem to be able to sniff out the time.
Odors Help a Dog Understand Time
A dog’s sense of smell is extraordinary, as canines contain more than 100 million scent receptors in their noses. That’s a paltry amount compared to the six million found in human noses. Because of this, when they have received the appropriate training, they can detect anything from homemade explosives to drugs. It is a theory that this sense of smell gives them the ability to tell time as well.
Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist and canine researcher at Columbia University, was the one to critically analyze the dog’s smelling ability to tell time. She wrote: “Dogs utilize their sense of smell to ‘tell time,’ in a sense because an odor that has been laid more recently smells stronger, while an odor that has been placed for a longer period of the time smells weaker.”
She gives the example that many dogs can determine the direction they should follow a scent trail by choosing to travel from the point where the scent is the faintest (the end at which it is the oldest) to the point where it is the strongest (the point at which it is the most recent), even though the degree of change in the intensity of the scent may be very slightly for a dozen or so steps.
Because more potent odors are typically more recent, but weaker odors generally are older, this indicates that when dogs sniff mild smells, they perceive events that occurred in the past. As we know that dogs can detect both fresh and stale odors, it follows that they are truly aware of happenings that transpired throughout varying amounts of time.
Therefore, the passing of time does have a stench, but unfortunately, our noses are not sensitive enough to pick up on it. In the universe of a dog, the past, the present, and even the future, in a roundabout way, are all stacked on top of one another, just waiting to be discovered by sniffing.
Can Dogs Smell What’s Coming?
A dog’s nose is much more intricate and sophisticated than ours, enabling dogs to detect odors that humans cannot. Our noses are very simple in comparison. Police dogs can sniff out drugs and they can even sniff out cancer.
Medical alert dogs are specially trained to help people with medical conditions, such as diabetes and epilepsy. These dogs can detect changes in their owner’s body chemistry and provide them with an early warning of an impending medical emergency. In many cases, this can help to prevent a serious health crisis.
Several organizations train medical alert dogs, and there is growing evidence of their effectiveness. One study found that diabetes alert dogs were able to accurately detect low blood sugar levels up to 45 minutes before they occurred.
Given the growing body of evidence, these service dogs can be a valuable asset for people with certain medical conditions. These dogs can provide early warning of an impending health crisis, which can potentially save lives.
However, time-sniffing dogs are something you may have never heard of before. And yet, when you try to see things from a dog’s perspective, it all starts to make sense: Humans are visual creatures; dogs are driven by odors.
According to Horowitz, “It’s as though dogs had a larger olfactory window on the present.” This window is far more significant than the one we have, and it contains both a reference from the past and a smell of the future in it.” Notably, dogs appear to be able to differentiate between 30 minutes and two hours, but there is no evidence to suggest that they are aware of the difference between two and four hours.
