1. Cancer

According to Peter Laskay, a pet expert, scientists are sure that dogs can sense cancer in its initial stages, particularly breast and lung cancer.

When someone is infected with this disease, the cancerous tumor releases certain proteins that pups can smell in urine. They are able to detect several types of these malignancies, such as bladder cancer, breast, prostate, and lung cancer.

There are clinics where dogs are trained to recognize the disease and they help the medical staff during the early stages of sickness.

2. Emotions

There’s an old quote, which says that dogs can sense our fear. I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but when I was little, as much as I loved dogs, I was very scared of them.

When I was walking alone and some stray dogs were near me, my heart used to beat like crazy. Needless to say, they all started to bark at me and aggressively run towards me.

That is because dogs are able to sense and understand our emotions even better than we can. As Jen Jones of Your Dog Advisor says when we experience different changes in our feelings, our hormones shift as well.

For example, when we are stressed, our bodies release cortisol or adrenaline, and when we are happy, our bodies discharge a hormone called oxytocin.

Dogs are able to detect these through our sweat and breath. Besides fear, they can sense when we are happy, sad, and stressed.

3. Heat

Following the results of research controlled by a group of scientists at Lund University in Sweden and Lorand University in Hungary, dogs can even sense tiny changes in temperature with the help of the sensory cells that are at the end of their noses.

These cells can be considered a type of infrared sensors, which give them the ability to smell these differences. This way, pups know exactly when humans, other dogs, or predators are close at hand.

4. Diabetes

Besides sniffing out cancer, dogs can distinguish changes in people’s blood glucose levels just from the way they breathe. This thing is very important for people who are diagnosed with diabetes.

In addition to that, there are pups who are actually trained to take care of patients who have severe diabetes. Their role is to warn the patients when their glucose levels are too low.

5. Natural disasters

When the weather is drastically changing and a big storm is coming right up, you might notice that your dog is behaving differently. That is because they have the ability to smell even the tiniest differences in the air (besides changes in temperature).

As a result, dogs can actually predict big weather events, such as a tornado, a storm, a hurricane, or an earthquake.