This post is part of the McGreevy seminar series. Click here for the index.

McGreevy mentioned various dog sensory capacity stats throughout his seminar.  This is only a brief post, but still interesting!

Sense of Smell

Dogs sense of smell is 100 times stronger than people’s.  As dog owners and trainers, we need to understand how ‘smelly’ the world is for dogs, and what that means for dogs when they’re trying to concentrate on us!

Smelling is a key skill for dogs, but there is no decent way to test the olfaction of dogs.  McGreevy suggested that cognitive function may be linked to sense of smell.

Hearing

Dogs have better hearing than us.  In particular, they can hear stuff that is higher in frequency than humans can hear.  The distance between a dog’s ears predict how much they can hear (but I don’t remember the equation, sorry!).

Dog Sight

Dogs are quite attuned to picking up visual signals.  Different dog breeds have different retinas, and so see in different ways.

Of course, there is a lot more that could be said about dog senses, but these are just what McGreevy mentioned over the course of the seminar.

This post is part of the McGreevy seminar series. Click here for the index.