Dog owners often notice that pets behave abnormally during difficult times. It turns out that this is not a game of imagination: dogs can really feel and react to negative experiences of the people around them.
A test dog sniffs out human sweat and respiratory samples
Belfast (Northern Ireland) Biologists at Queen's University found that different breeds of dogs can judge a person's stress condition with an accuracy of more than 90%. Scientists wrote in the journal Public Science Library No. 1, , that due to their keen sense of smell, the four-legged "friends of humans" can feel the slightest deviation of a person's biochemical traces.
The bodies of many animals, including humans, continue to emit VOC into the environment. This is a manifestation of an evolutionary mechanism: odor creates a complete biochemical signaling system through which animals interact.
Because of the rough sense of smell, a person can only sense the strongest odor, but animals like dogs can even catch the weakest and most delicate odor. Given that people began to domesticate some canine animals tens of thousands of years ago, dogs may have mastered the ability to judge their owner's psychological state by smell.
Scientists have verified this hypothesis through a series of experiments. First, they collected sweat and breathing samples from 36 people who were in resting state. The following sample was taken from the same person but was already in a stressful state, which was determined by participants’ self-assessment and objective indicators such as heart rate and blood pressure. The authors of this work randomly mixed all these samples with other odor samples, including non-human odors.
Next, the researchers selected four different breeds of dogs and conducted a total of 720 odor identification tests. At 93.75% of the time, animals respond to the “smell of stress” – they begin to act alert and uneasy. Moreover, the recognition accuracy rate reached 96.88%, not less than 90%.
The authors of the study concluded that stress conditions change the biochemical components of human sweat and breathing, and that dogs can feel it through their keen sense of smell. Therefore, they can be used as sensitive detectors for negative psychological processes such as anxiety, panic attacks and Post-traumatic stress disorder . But it is not clear what exactly changes in the composition of these biological fluids and what specific substances dogs respond to.
This new finding coincides with previous research: for example, they show that dogs are very good at smelling the scent of people infected with coronavirus. Even if the patient does not have any Covid-19 symptoms, the detection accuracy rate is more than 97%. Therefore, it is not surprising that the fact that dogs have learned to recognize their owner’s anxiety and anxiety is. In addition, after tens of thousands of years of domestication, unlike wild dogs, dogs have obtained many innate mechanisms , which are specifically "tailored" for humans.
