UK (Commonwealth Union) – A dog’s sense of smell has long been known to be highly advanced where sniffer dogs have often been used in airports and military checkpoints to alert the authorities on the presence of narcotics and explosives. A new study has demonstrated that a dog’s sense of smell maybe even more advanced than previously assumed.
The study was conducted by the Queen’s University Belfast where it was demonstrated that dogs can sniff out stress from human sweat and breath. The study was carried out with 4 dogs that had been named Treo, Fingal, Soot and Winnie, and 36 people.
Researchers obtained samples of sweat and breath from participants prior and after they conducted a laborious math’s problem. The participants revealed their stress levels before and after the task and only samples where the person’s blood pressure and heart rate had been elevated were implemented in the study.
The dogs were instructed how to find a scent line-up and guide the scientist to the correct sample. The stress and relaxed samples were then implemented but at this stage the researchers were unaware if there was an odor difference identifiable by the dogs. Each test session, saw a dog presented with a person’s relaxed and stressed samples, taken only with 4-minute gaps. All dogs could accurately inform the researchers to each individual’s stress sample.
Clara Wilson, a PhD student in the School of Psychology at Queen’s University stated that the results indicate that humans, produce various smells via our sweat and breath when we are stressed which dogs can mark apart from our smell when relaxed irrespective of if they know the person or not. “The research highlights that dogs do not need visual or audio cues to pick up on human stress. This is the first study of its kind and it provides evidence that dogs can smell stress from breath and sweat alone, which could be useful when training service dogs and therapy dogs,” she added.
