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New Study: Dogs can smell when we’re stressed out and want to help us

By Giovanna Mengarelli

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA - MARCH 23: Paula Ziadi hugs Truman, a black Labrador retriever, as they hunt for Burmese pythons along a levee in the Florida Everglades on March 23, 2021 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is using the dogs to sniff out Burmese pythons. A black lab named Truman and a point setter named Eleanor hunt five days a week with a dog handler and an FWC biologist to search for pythons on different public lands across south Florida. The FWC is implementing dog sniffing python hunters to help find and eliminate invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades ecosystem. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA - MARCH 23: Paula Ziadi hugs Truman, a black Labrador retriever, as they hunt for Burmese pythons along a levee in the Florida Everglades on March 23, 2021 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is using the dogs to sniff out Burmese pythons. A black lab named Truman and a point setter named Eleanor hunt five days a week with a dog handler and an FWC biologist to search for pythons on different public lands across south Florida. The FWC is implementing dog sniffing python hunters to help find and eliminate invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades ecosystem. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) /
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It’s widely known that all of a dog’s senses are super strong and much more extreme than us humans’ senses are. It’s also been believed that dogs can also detect extreme emotional changes in us humans as well.

All of this has been even further proven by a study and multiple experiments done over at the Queen’s University Belfast in the U.K.

This was all done by having dogs detect stress changes from both sweat and breath samples.

How can dogs detect when we’re stressed out? Let’s find out more!

For this particular new experiment, four dogs were all presented with breath and sweat samples from the selected humans (volunteers, of course). But they weren’t just randomly collected samples. In order to determine some level of stress, both types of samples were taking before and after the participants had been involved in a difficult math exercise (having to count backwards from 9,000 in increments of 17…I’m already stressed out just thinking about them doing it).

With over a 90 percent accuracy, the canines were able to determine which samples came before the exercise and which samples can afterwards, due to some odor components.

An additional study was then done by offering the pups three different choices: an unused piece of gauze, a sample from a stressed person, and one from the same person, but this time unstressed.

With the blood pressure samples before and after the math task, as well as their heart rate and other outside factors, the dogs’ accuracy moved from a 90 percent all the way up to a 96.88 percent!

Here’s a little bit more of the scientific aspect of things to put it into perspective here:

  • We have 12 million smell receptors – dogs have at least 50 times that
  • Other animals:
    • One therapy cat, Oscar, could smell death and sense when it was near
    • A study done on horses by Dr. Katherine Houpt, showed and aimed to prove that horses could tell the difference if people had just watched a comedy vs. a horror film

That’s a wrap on a dog’s amazing sense of smell and what else they can do to help us out!

Hot. National Dog Day 2022: Dogs saving veterans affected by PTSD!!. light

Aren’t animals just so amazing? Dogs are the best though! What has been the coolest thing that you’ve noticed your dog have the ability to sense and/or do? Let’s chat – Woof, Woof!

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