Your dog doesn’t just use its nose to find leftovers on the counter or that aging piece of garbage on your walks. It actually uses its nose to discover critical information, like recognizing family members, identifying predators and, of course, locating food.
And this incredible sense of smell could also inform dogs about their human companions. A new study published in PLOS ONE found that dogs can detect when humans are stressed based on the odor profiles we produce. The study sheds more light on our relationship with dogs and could improve training for anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) service dogs.
