Ever wondered why your dog loves to sniff everything from the pavement to the Vicars … um er …trouser leg? ‘Embarrassing’ isn’t the word when the poor man has come to save your soul  and Fluffy can’t keep his cold, wet,  nose out of  his  business! And how you blush and grab your dog, and try to explain that your little cherub has never, ever behaved in that lewd and lecherous manner before … which actually only makes the situation more poignant.

The canine nose

Well, apart from losing face with the whole congregation once the story breaks, you can relax because little Fluffit isn’t a sniffing sex fiend at all and you don’t need a petshrink either. Save your money and start taking your four-footer out on a daily reading expedition. You see, in some ways dogs are superior to us. For one, we humans don’t shape up scent-ually speaking when compared to our dogs’ highly specialised, cutting edge sniffing apparatus.  The canine nose is capable of detecting underground gas leaks, from a pipes buried six metres beneath impacted soil, topped by a metre of snow!

And the reason why Mother Nature provided canines with this unrivalled super technology is because dogs were hunters before we domesticated their ancestors. And because they were wild predators in those days, they needed to source their meals and then sniff them down, sometimes for many miles … for which they needed superhuman delux scenting ability.

So why do they sniff so much nowadays?

But now that Supermarkets are the modern hunting grounds, there is no need for these master skills. So instead, dogs love to sniff and turn their noses to ‘reading’ the gossip columns and the news of the day, or any other fresh information which comes through their front door. You see, your dog’s impertinent sniff of the vicar’s rear end in all probability revealed the dear man’s full CV,  including nose-maps of where he had been during the last three days, together with explicit pictures of with who and how, together with a whole lot more titillating and highly privileged information … the canine nose is truly amazing!

How to make your dog happy

Now, if you really want to keep your dog a happy chappy, clip on his lead, take him outside your boring old property where the smells are stale and wearing thin, and let him sniff away the blues on the side-walk and under the bushes in a new and exciting world of up to date data and breaking news. But, be warned, he’ll probably also want to submit his own couple of scents worth to the neighbourhood scandal … so don’t forget your poop bag!