Dogs smell of cancer and take on people’s grief, but they do not feel guilty. The research teaches us more and more about the world of dogs.

How Smart Are Dogs Really?

In recent years, dog consciousness has become an increasingly intensive research object. Dogs are easy to study. They exist in millions of the world and are not subject to the rules that restrict the use of wildlife in research. Dogs are usually not afraid of new situations either.

Dogs originate from wolves that settled near people in the different regions of Eurasia during the recent ice age. The individuals survived the best that the people tolerated. That was the beginning of the tampering.

The idea that a wolf flock is led by an alpha male who conflicts with his position was established by Rudolph Schenken who reported his findings from the Basel Zoo in Switzerland in 1947. This has later been proven to be incorrect. The delusion, however, lived on and unfortunately also included dogs.

Dogs smell cancer!

Often a dog is portrayed as an ideal personality that lacks the disadvantages of human character. However, dogs are no angels – nor are they wise as dog owners often praise.

The relationship between a dog and a person is uniquely intimate and so dogs and their abilities are also associated with many beliefs. Often, a dog is described as an ideal personality that does not have the disadvantages of human character.

Also at the University of Arizona in the United States, the cognitive abilities of dogs have been investigated. The same experiment was previously done for a group of two-year-old children and chimpanzees. The chimpanzees were the best in environmental perception tasks. Children and dogs were there when it came to interpreting social tips, such as finding a hidden reward by following a point or eye direction. It was previously known that children became better than the chimpanzees in the skills at the age of two, but now the dogs turned out to be equally skilled. In addition, it turned out that children and dogs who managed to cooperate with a social task were generally good at other tasks as well.

Dogs respond to speech so accurately and naturally that many believe they understand a lot of words and even grammar. The world record for dog language proficiency is held by the border collie Chaser, to whom Professor John W. Pilley learned the name of 1,022 objects. Chaser can also interpret the meaning in two different word pairs: “stir frisbee” and “take frisbee” mean different things. Chaser and other dog language geniuses – all of whom are border collies – follow the verbal instructions about as skillfully as two to three-year-olds. Usually, however, the vocabulary of dogs moves around dozens of words. The understanding of words is also limited.

No, your dog is not necessarily better at smelling than you.

The fact that dogs have a far more advanced sense of smell than humans is a myth – which can now be crushed, according to new research.

“People have for so long failed to stop and question this claim,” says neuroscientist John McGann.

Can feel a trillion smells

According to previous research, humans would have the ability to sense around 10,000 different smells. But a study at Berkeley University has shown that there can be as many as one trillion.

In the study, students with blinders and hearing protectors had to rely on their sense of smell and follow different odor traces.

But people and dogs can feel different smells different good. Humans can develop a sense of smell for wine and coffee, while dogs learn to distinguish other dogs’ urine.