Do Dogs Think?

Do Dogs Think?  A gleaning from the excellent book “How Dogs Think” by Stanly Coren.  You own a dog?  Get it!

Smell: Dogs can separate scents in their Left and Right nostril.  This gives them insight into direction.

Dogs with pointy ears (like mine) do not scent as well as say, a Beagle with long flopping ears.  The latter lifts ground scent up to its nose!  The more the ears flop, the more air moves around its head.

Pheromone scent is present in humans (armpits; groin mostly) where a dog and most animals have these transmitters spread all over their bodies; at the base of every hair!  Yes, your dog will smell like a dog to you but to other dogs, it smells like a large personality book.  

Yet again, the Pheromone is carried in the dog’s urine and feces.  And the Dog’s fur leaves a lasting record of their presence at the spot when they have rubbed against a twig or branch or Chesterfield. This is why Dogs try to pee high on the post or rail or tree; to have the scent into the wind.  It is in every truth a mailbox for the animals.

These scents will ID male, female and what their status or physical state is. On your walk, let your dog use its nose!

Tests were done on tracking abilities based on scents.  Beagles, Bassett’s and Bloodhounds could locate a mouse in a minute in a maze.

Terriers, on the other hand, took 15 minutes!  That’s not shoddy considering the least of them can sense Odor at 1 in 2 million parts while the best of them can sense odors at 1/10 th of that!  That is detecting a specific odor in an area the size of a large city!

Sight: Dogs are not color blind. They see color but not as much as humans do.  Humans see rainbow colors as violet, blue, blue-green, green yellow, orange and red and dogs see it  as dark blue, light blue, gray, light yellow, darker yellow (sort of brown)

Right now one of the most popular toys for dogs is a bright fluorescence orange used for traffic cones and even hats for hunters. Yet when we throw this gaudy ball for the dog to fetch it runs right past it until it is found eventually with its nose. Reason?  For a dog, the bright orange is seen as nearly the same color as the grass!   

Shades of blue will work best when thrown on grass.  A toy that is blue and yellow with white strips would be perfect for a throw toy.

The dog that chases the orange Frisby can’t see the Frisby but can see the little logo on them. That is pretty clever to my mind.
No Segway into this one:  Dogs with a white coloring and black spots are prone to blindness!  Dalmatians with blue eyes have a 50% chance of going blind while those without the blue eyes range in the 40% - 30% range of being blind at least in one eye!  Dalmatians seem to be the most popular house pets due to the movie which doesn't mention their propensity for blindness.

So, do dogs think?  I choose to think so as their world is thousands of times larger than ours because of their acute hearing; acute sense of smell leaving vision as a bit of a bonus.