Dog Owner's Manual › Introduction › 

A Dog's Senses

All dogs possess a highly developed suite of environmental sensors. The data they furnish provide canines with a situational awareness far superior to that of humans.

Visual Sensors: The dog’s vision is a legacy system from the wolf. It is excellent for spotting moving targets at great distances and in poor lighting. However, dogs see fewer colors than humans and cannot discern fine detail. At close range they rely heavily on their sense of smell, which is almost unequaled in the animal world.

Olfactory Sensors: While human noses contain between 5 million and 20 million scent-analyzing cells, dogs can carry 200 million or more. The bloodhound, famed for its tracking skills, possesses 300 million. To handle all this data, the olfactory processing center of a dog’s brain is 40 times larger than that of humans. This faculty allows rescue dogs to detect humans buried under an avalanche and enables tracking hounds to follow scent trails that are 3 days old.

Auditory Sensors: Dog ears can move independently of each other, allowing them to pinpoint the origins of specific sounds in a fraction of a second. Dogs can also hear extremely high frequencies (as high as 40,000 cycles per second, compared to 20,000 per second for humans) and detect noises at roughly four times the range of humans. In other words, what you hear at 50 feet (15 m), a dog can hear at 200 feet (60 m).

Tactile Sensors: Each hair in a dog’s coat acts as an antenna, feeding environmental data to a mechanoreceptor nerve at its base. This data allows the canine to be acutely aware of its immediate surroundings.

Taste Sensors: Dogs possess only about 1,700 taste buds compared to roughly 9,000 in humans. This relative lack of taste explains their undiscriminating palates, allowing them to eat almost any food without complaint (and to lick themselves without gagging).

Welcome to Your New Dog

Comments (1)

Quirk BooksThe Dog Owner’s Manual is a basic guide to dog care.
The book was written by a celebrated veterinarian and an acclaimed author. It provides dog owners with well-researched and helpful information presented in a lighthearted manner. The creators chose to write the book in a style similar to what you'd find in "operating instructions" for a car or computer, so it would be in a familiar language for someone learning how to do something for the first time. Of course they—and we—respect the fact that our beloved pets are not products or machines, and we hope you will read this guide and discover that it is as valuable as it is fun to read.

Introduction

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This manual was written in a tongue-in-cheek parody of a computer or mechanical owner's manual; no where in the manual is there any language that should be construed as devaluing your dog. It is a parody, with a comic slant to very useful information. Please do not read the content to be an attack on the love we all have for our dogs, because it clearly was not meant that way. I found the entire manual to be hilarious, along with the "mechanical" illustrations.

barked by Susyn Stecchi on Apr 21, 2008 AT 4:16 pm PDT
1 person found this comment helpful.
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