Let’s be honest here: dogs are the best! They are smart, joyful, cute, fluffy, and they can actually be considered heroes! If you don’t believe me when I tell you that, let me prove you wrong!

We all know that dogs can feel the world around them by smelling everything. It’s their natural behavior, but it’s also a survival instinct. Your pup’s nose has approximately 300 million olfactory receptors, also known as odor receptors and it’s 50 times stronger than ours when it comes to picking up different types of aroma.

That is because the human nose only contains 6 million olfactory receptors. Despite surviving and enjoying the things that surround them, dogs’ noses help them discover a lot of things that we can’t!

Here are 10 things dogs can sniff out that humans can’t!

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.

6. Bed bugs

Even though bed bugs can be hard to see for the human eye, their scent glands release an odor that is undetectable for the human eye unless there is an infestation.

However, dogs have stronger noses than us and they can detect this smell even in the early stages. For instance, there are several new forms of pest control, which implicate bed-bug sniffing dogs in their activity.

Their senses are so accurate, that they can help get rid of these insects long before an infestation gets out of control.

7. Coronavirus

Cindy Otto, Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Working Dog Center is currently working on training eight Labrador Retrievers to smell the new coronavirus.

If she succeeds, dogs will have the ability to sniff out Covid-19 in different places, such as hospitals, airports, and other public spots. However, these smart pups won’t replace the usual SARS-CoV-2 tests.

8. Ovulation and pregnancy

As we’ve already previously established, dogs are very sensitive when it comes to the smell in our urine. This means that they are also receptive to our hormones as well.

When a woman is pregnant, her body goes through different stages and changes, and dogs are able to pick up on those. That is because these hormonal changes come with modifications in body odors that dogs can smell, even if the pregnancy is still in its early stages.

9. Drugs 

There are dogs who have such fine noses, that they can be trained to detect certain types of chemicals in drugs. In conformity with Russell Hartstein of Fun Paw Care, LLC, this smell is not strong enough for people to perceive, but dogs don’t have a problem with that.

10. People 

Dogs can use their noses to track down people by smell, which is why some breeds are used when looking for missing persons. Pups can follow a certain type of smell from footstep to footstep and they can even catch odors in the air.

However, some breeds are better at this job compared to others, due to the fact that their olfactory capacities have adapted to the survival mode over time.

…If you love dogs as much as we do and you want to know more about them, here is a great article for you: 8 Fluffiest Dog Breeds You Will ADORE!