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| June 24,2002 – SOSI Abstract Number: 2 A Certain Doggy Odor, Avery N. Gilbert In the olfactory equivalent of a newspaper’s “man bites dog” story, researchers in Ireland have turned the platitude about canine smell discrimination ability on its head. They find that dog owners are able to recognize the scent of their own pet. Deborah Wells and Peter Hepper at Queens University of Belfast recruited twenty-six dog owners for the study. To collect doggy odor, each owner was given a flannel blanket on which the dog slept for three consecutive nights. (This is a twist on the T-shirt sniff tests used in studies of human body odor.) A second blanket was hung in the pet’s sleeping room, out of the animal’s reach, in order to collect ambient scent for control comparisons. The dogs were not bathed or groomed with scented products for one month prior to testing in order to insure a natural body odor. In the actual test, owners were blindfolded and presented with two plastic bags. One contained their dog’s blanket and the other contained the blanket of an unfamiliar dog. The owner was asked to identify which sample smelled strongest and which smelled most pleasant, and to identify the sample that belonged to his or her own dog. The comparison dog was selected to match as closely as possible the breed, sex and age of their own animal. Wells and Hepper found that 88.5% of owners accurately chose the odor belonging to their own pet—a statistically significant result. The strength and pleasantness of the odor was not a factor in the ability to correctly identify the pet, nor was the sex of the owner or the dog. In contrast, the ability of participants to identify the odor of their own home was not different from chance. The blanket hung in their own house did not smell stronger or more pleasant than the blanket from the unfamiliar home, nor did these rating have any bearing on their ability to chose the correct blanket. So score one for the human nose—so often disparaged in comparisons to animal abilities—and chalk up another point for mammalian body odors that carry enough information for individual identification. Perhaps we are not so far removed from our primate origins as Freud thought. In a recent coda to her canine study, Dr. Wells and another colleague conducted a similar study with pet cats and their owners. This time the results were different: cat owners were unable to identify their own animal by smell. Speculating on the different outcomes of the two studies, Wells points to the fact that cats spend more time grooming themselves and thus may provide less body odor for their owners to work with. What she doesn’t mention is that dogs are a social animal while cats are essentially solitary. Perhaps individually identifiable body odor serves a communication role for social species like dogs—and humans. Courtney, N., & Wells, D.L. The discrimination of cat odours by humans. Perception, 31:511-512, 2002. Wells, D.L., & Hepper, P.G. The discrimination of dog odours by humans. Perception, 29:111-115, 2000. |
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