You’ve just arrived at a friend’s home freshly coiffed and ready to socialize, and soon after you cross the door’s threshold the family dog greets you enthusiastically by sticking his nose in your nether regions. Even to dog lovers like myself, this can be embarrassing and daunting at the same time as you quickly try to push the well-meaning dog’s nose away from your “business!”

To a dog, your “name” is the scent you project and in the dog world the scent of “private parts” is where it all begins. A dog can sense odors at concentrations nearly 100 million times lower than we can. In other words, they can detect one drop of blood in five quarts of water! Of all a dog’s senses, its sense of smell is the most highly developed. They have about 25 times more olfactory (smell) receptors than we do which are located in special sniffing cells deep in a dog’s snout.

When a dog breathes normally, air doesn’t pass directly over the smell receptors. However, when a dog takes a big sniff, the air travels all the way to the smell receptors near the back of the dog’s snout. For a dog, sniffing is a big part of smelling. Have you ever closed the door on your dog and heard him loudly sniffing under the door. He’s trying to detect what’s going on by using his smell receptors.

Modern science has benefited greatly by the excellent nose of dogs because they can sniff out all sorts of smells that humans miss. Canines have been trained to aid us in track and rescue, drug and bomb detection and to detect a wide variety of scents. Dogs have also saved lives by detecting diseases their owners were not even aware they had such as cancer and diabetes.

Your dog also gets all the neighborhood news through its nose. Even sniffing the bare sidewalk a dog can detect a wealth of information whether it’s a neighborhood cat that’s passed by or a hamburger someone dropped last week.

What we humans think stinks, will smell like perfume to your dog. Maybe that’s why they’re so eager to roll in something really smelly after you’ve had them groomed or given them a bath.

But to those of you who have "nose-friendly" dogs - for the sake of all of us visitors - please hold on to Fido’s collar or put him in the back yard when we first arrive. The truth is, a dog is able to get “scent information” from us as far as three or four feet away. They don’t have to be “up close and personal” to find out what they need to know about us!