Hidden Talents and Surprising Skills of Dogs

All dogs are said to be smart, although the level of intelligence varies with each breed. It is said that the average dog has an IQ of 100, and while dogs don't process information the same way that humans do, this doesn't make them any less intelligent. There are certain things that dogs are capable of that humans can't even dream of. The hidden talents and surprising skills of dogs may not be too amazing to those with dogs because you know how incredibly smart and beloved fur companions can truly be but for those that haven't yet experienced the wonder, prepare to be truly amazed.

Dogs are especially good at social cognition. They're able to read and understand humans better than many other animals. Researchers can't agree why. Some believe that it is evolutionary, as dog breeding has favored qualities that would make them good companions to humans, such as being able to understand us better.It was hard to determine what belonged on this list. While many things that dogs can do are amazing, no doubt, they're often also common knowledge.

To compose this list, 24/7 Tempo tried choosing things that were not quite common knowledge but were still rather interesting. We then researched our choices in-depth by looking at the studies performed in question and what the conclusions were, without the fanfare of a typical article. We looked at the methodology of each study and looked for studies that repeated the original premise to further cement the truth of what dogs are capable of. (For more interesting dog information, next read 32 Paw-some Facts You Probably Don't Know About Dogs.)

A research team led by Professor Thomas Quinn from Lake Erie College of Osteopath Medicine in Erie, Pennsylvania worked with a small team of beagles to put their noses to the test. The team picked beagles specifically because they are scent hounds—dogs bred for tracking and chasing small game using their noses. Beagles, in particular, have 225 million olfactory receptors compared to a human's 5 million.

The dogs were able to distinguish the cancerous blood samples with 97.5% specificity and 96.7% sensitivity. Quinn intends to see if it's possible to use dogs to find the biomarkers of blood samples from people with non-small cell lung cancer. He also plans to repeat the study using breath samples instead of blood samples. The participants will breathe into a special mask and the dogs will assess those samples. The goal is to eventually create a cheap, over-the-counter breath test that will determine if a person has cancer.

However, the AKC stated that whether dogs can truly smell the difference in scent when a person gets pregnant is mostly conjecture. There is no scientific evidence that shows whether dogs can actually distinguish the scent of a pregnant person from a non-pregnant one. However, Dr. Ann Hohenhaus, DVM, suggests that she "suspects dogs can smell something we cannot." What that thing is, we don't really know.

Some dog owners report that their dogs' behavior towards them changed when they became pregnant—even before the person in question knew they were pregnant. Brook Oscarson, a parenting blog writer, writes "Within just a few weeks of my pregnancy, the dog's demeanor changed. If we were playing sports with my siblings, and he sensed things were getting too intense, he'd bark and run over to check on me." Another blogger reports that her dogs became so hyper-vigilant during her pregnancy that she was unable to walk them without assistance.

While smelling cancer and pregnancy is certainly amazing, it doesn't capture just how sensitive a dog's nose is. Bomb-sniffing dogs can smell as little as one picogram—a trillionth of a gram—of TNT in a sample. A typical cinnamon roll has one gram of cinnamon. That's a trillion times more than how much TNT needs to be present for a bomb-sniffing dog to flag something.

Under perfect conditions, dogs have been verified to detect scents that are up to 20 kilometers—around 12 miles—away. Human noses are by no means primitive. We can distinguish about 1 trillion smells. However, a lot of that information goes through our subconscious brain and we never actually think about it.

Your dog probably doesn't think that hard about smells that are 12 miles away. However, it's still nice to think that your dog might know when you're 10 miles from home. It's comforting in a way.

They also understand it on a deeper level than we first thought. Many people assume their dogs only understand words by association with treats. Thus, they think their dogs understand words as a mere association with a command to receive treats. However, your dog may have picked up more human language than you think.

However, a research team in Hungary observed dogs' cognitive response to three types of words: words they knew, words that sounded like the words they knew, and nonsense words that did not sound like words they knew. The results were interesting. When distinguishing instructions they knew from words that did not mimic the lexicon they were familiar with, the dogs' cognitive responses were actually on par with human responses. However, they had the same cognitive response to words that sounded like words they knew when they heard a word that they knew.

The emergence of emotional support animals is all you need to know about the emotional intelligence of dogs, and other animals, for that matter. However, we don't know exactly how it is that dogs understand our feelings. On some level, it may be a scent-based judgment from minute hormonal changes that accompany our feelings.

Dogs use many different stimuli to determine how they should react to different things, like feelings. We mentioned before that dogs have excellent social cognition. That means they're able to identify and react to feelings in a way that is comprehensible and reasonable. The science behind it is a mixed bag, not in efficacy, but in that, it's actually very complex reasoning that dogs use to determine what they identify as your current state of mind.

The University of Naples did studies on whether or not dogs could identify emotional states through body odors. They used "odor donors" and dispersed the scents through a room while the dogs were present with their owner and stranger. When dogs were exposed to "happy odors", they were more curious about the stranger and at ease. However, when exposed to "fearful odors", they presented with more signs of stress and sought reassurance from their owners.

Royal Society scientists analyzed the eyeballs of several species of mammals, including dogs, and found lenses that allow UV light through in dogs' eyes. This lens may explain why dogs have a habit of staring at power lines. While humans see power lines as ropes in the sky, dogs see the UV light bursting forth from within them. We probably don't have to tell you that it sounds like an interesting thing to look at.

The ability to sense thermal radiation might be one of the reasons dogs are so good at search and rescue jobs. Their noses can't just smell the presence of humans from 12 miles away, they can also detect weak thermal signals, like the ones put out by humans trapped in wreckage or snow.

For instance, a lot of people know that dogs are really good at finding their way home when they're lost. After all, the part of the "Lassie" series where the titular dog finds her way home from all sorts of situations was based on a real experience by dog owners. However, science suggests that they use the Earth's magnetic field as a compass when they do this navigation.

It's not so hard to figure out where you are when you can sense the magnetic field of the planet. Dogs have also been observed using minute changes in the Earth's magnetic field to find shortcuts in terrain that humans wouldn't be able to see.

Typically, dogs prefer to poop facing North. Pooping isn't the only thing they use their magnetic GPS for. They'll also realign themselves with the magnetic field before peeing or sleeping in some cases, too.

These rods make their eyes more sensitive to smaller amounts of light. So, what might be "dark" to you, might still be navigable for your dog. However, it's not just the rods that make dogs able to see in the dark. The real secret lies in the tapetum lucidum, an evolutionary feature shared between cats, dogs, and many other creatures, particularly nocturnal ones.

It's also the reason why your dog turns into some kind of demon from Hell when you shine a light on it. You can't just reflect light without creating a reflection. So, when you shine a light at your dog, the light reflects off their tapetum lucidum and creates a light inside their eye that makes them look like they've been possessed by the devil.

However, some scientists are interested in knowing whether animals can truly predict natural disasters. A study of an earthquake in Siberia showed that a significant number of dogs in the area presented with anxious behaviors, such as barking for no reason, howling, whining, and running around in the minutes or hours just before the earthquake hit. Another study looked at 729 reports of abnormal animal behavior before earthquakes over several species, including dogs, cats, birds, cows, elephants, toads, and fish.

They hope that if we can draw a meaningful conclusion between animal behavior and natural disasters, we can use crowd-sourced information about local animal behavior to predict natural disasters and respond to them more appropriately. In the future, we may have an application we can check to see if local animals are acting strangely so we can prepare for potential disasters.

Scientists don't know how that metabolic switch works, just that it exists and that Huskies use it all the time to keep their muscles from declining when they run long distances. Using this metabolic switch, Huskies have been known to run upwards of 100 miles a day, with some able to cover 1,100 miles in just 9 days of running.