Dogs can smell stress in our breath and sweat, enabling them to calm PTSD and anxiety sufferers before debilitating attacks happen, researchers say
- The canine nose has long been known for detecting physical ailments like cancer, but animal specialists have now found dogs can smell stress in breath and sweat
- This means they can be trained to preemptively offer comfort to sufferers of psychological illnesses like PTSD, to prevent attacks and improve quality of life
On a walk and when I let her off the lead, my Labrador Jip will pick up a scent and she’s off, on the trail of something that none of my senses can detect, with an urgency I cannot understand.
Deborah Debes, a canine behaviour specialist with a certificate in pet psychology, who runs Hong Kong’s DogManGoWoof dog training service, explains why. Dogs have such a strong sense of smell, she says, that they can tell when we are coming home by smelling us before we have even set foot in the door.
A dog’s nose is thousands of times more sensitive than ours, Debes says, with up to 300 million scent receptors compared to a human’s 5 million to 6 million. The area of the canine brain related to the sense of smell is roughly 40 times bigger than a human’s.
Understanding the extent of a dog’s sense of smell – a superpower that has been harnessed to detect illicit drugs, ivory, weapons, missing people and bodies – drives the work of animal psychologist Dr Clara Wilson at Queen’s University Belfast, in Northern Ireland.
She recently led a study on dogs’ ability to sniff out human stress and why and how this might be useful.