The Dog’s Senses

The dog’s eyes are designed so that he can see well in relative darkness, has excellent peripheral vision, and is very good at tracking moving objects, all skills that are important to a carnivore. Dogs also have good depth perception. Those advantages come at a price, though: Dogs are nearsighted and are slow to change the focus of their vision. It’s a myth that dogs are color-blind. However, while they can see some (but not all) colors, their eyes were designed to most clearly perceive subtle shades of gray, an advantage when they are hunting in low light.

Dogs have about six times fewer taste buds on their tongue than humans do. They can taste sweet, sour, bitter, and salty tastes, but with so few taste buds than we do, they are likely to try anything and usually do.
A dog’s ears can swivel independently, like radar dishes, to pick up sounds and pinpoint their location. Dogs can locate a sound in 6⁄100 of a second and hear sound four times farther away than we can (which is why there is no reason to yell at your dog).

They can also hear sounds at far higher pitches than we can. In their first few days of life, puppies primarily use their sense of touch to navigate their world. Whiskers on the face, above the eyes, and below the jaws are sensitive enough to detect changes in airflow. Dogs also have touch-sensitive nerve endings all over their bodies, including on their paws.


Smell may be a dog’s most remarkable sense. Dogs have about 220 million scent receptors in their nose, compared to about 5 million in humans, and a large part of the canine brain is devoted to interpreting scent. Not only can dogs smell scents that are very faint, but they can also accurately distinguish between those scents. In other words, when you smell a pot of spaghetti sauce cooking, your dog probably smells tomatoes and onions and garlic and oregano and whatever else is in the pot.