Dog senses are extremely important since they help a canine interpret and communicate with the world around it. Through listening, seeing, and smelling, dogs can quickly determine the intentions or status of another dog nearby. They can for example, determine if an approaching dog is submissive, dominant, aggressive, curious, friendly, or even possibly, a potential mating partner. Here’s a look at those dog senses and why they work the way they do.

Hearing

Dog hearing can not only pick up sounds much farther than what any of us can detect, it can also pick up high pitched sounds that we can’t even hear. It can also help locate a sound’s source – making dog excellent hunting or search and rescue partners. When dog hearing responds to a dog barking, whining, or howling (even if that sound is 5 blocks away), it responds to the tone and pitch of the sound.

Part of the reason why dogs can pick up such sounds is because of the way their ears are shaped and the way their ears move. Dog ears can turn in directions we can only imagine. Only a small proportion of us can move our ears, but that movement doesn’t begin to match that of a dog. Even the shape of our ears hinder our ability to hear the things that dogs do. The cup shape of some dog breeds helps retain sound and amplify waves.

Sight

Nearly colorblind as compared to humans, dogs use peripheral vision to catch sight of things we don’t notice. Although the wide positioning of dogs' eyes, which is an advantage for peripheral vision, limits depth perception, which depends on overlapping images from both eyes. 

The retina’s reflective tissue in a dog's eye enhances its night vision. Both peripheral vision and reflective tissue give dogs the advantage over unwelcomed night intruders and help make them excellent house alarms.

Of course dog vision isn’t exclusive to guarding the house. Dogs interpret quick movements easier than slow movements, and when interpreting the quick movements of another dog, they can easily discern gestures of play, belly exposure, teeth baring, and all other postures dogs assume to communicate with one another. 

Smell

A dog’s sense of smell is probably one of the most important of all. A deaf and blind dog for example can manage around its world with a good sense of smell just fine. Dogs can interpret their surroundings and situations with their noses as easily as they do so with vision and hearing. With smell, dogs can detect gender, another dog’s territory, a female dog’s sexual cycle, submission or dominant canines, and even age. And they can do all of this through smelling another dog’s defecation, urination, or anal glands. There’s a lot to be learned from another dog’s scent, and it’s what drives a dog to continuously stop and sniff seemingly everything in sight. Male dogs may even urinate or defecate over another dog’s deposits as a way to reclaim or claim ownership of a particular location. Female dogs in heat will do the same. Both genders may scratch an area in which they’ve relieved themselves in order to spread the odor they’ve left behind -- via stinky paw impressions.

One of the things that makes a dog’s sense of smell so strong is the nose’s engineering. Its exterior moisture traps odor molecules that enter the nostrils and hit about 15 times the number of cilia that we have. These molecules travel through the dog’s long nose along 150 – 250 million olfactory cells and meet their final resting place in the dog’s mucous membranes. Through such a tremendous system, dogs can even smell emotions and feelings!