Dog noses.

Did you know dogs can understand 100 or more human words?!

Some breeds, for instance the Border Collie Chaser, can understand up to 1000 words. That’s crazy.

Especially since I know exactly zero dog words. Or barks. I mean, I am clueless.

“You want to go out? Or are you barking at the tennis ball behind the chair?”

I like watching the police shows and especially On Patrol Live. My favorite part is when the dumb criminals try to run, and the police bring in the K-9. These dogs are so excited to get to work and I think they probably see the TV cameras and decide to show off because within minutes they usually track down the criminal, no matter how good he is hiding.

Their noses are just incredible.

While humans have about 5 to 6 million olfactory receptors, dogs have up to 300 million, depending on the breed. Their brains also devote a much larger area to processing smells—about 40 times more than humans proportionally.

Bloodhounds are the gold standard when it comes to smelling stuff. They can follow a scent trail that is days or even weeks old, over miles of terrain. Their scent trails have been upheld in court as evidence due to their reliability.

Bloodhounds can follow a single human’s scent even when it’s mixed with thousands of other smells. I heard it described once like a thousand strings crisscrossed and the bloodhound can identify just one single string and follow it from beginning to end, ignoring the others.

Police K-9’s can be trained to sniff out drugs, explosives, lost people, and criminals. That’s just mind blowing to me.

I have an unusually keen sense of smell, and I consider it a negative not a positive.

Just imagine if we could smell everything a dog smells! A dog’s nose can detect odor concentrations at 1 part per trillion. That’s like detecting a single drop of liquid in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

I sometimes think of that when I see a dog sniffing somebody’s shoes, or the garbage, or a pile of you know what.

I always figured nothing smells bad to a dog. I mean, they’ll eat rotten meat and roll on top of a dead animal. And let’s not even get into the whole butt-sniffing thing they do with other dogs.

Apparently that’s not exactly true.

There are certain odors dogs naturally dislike, often because they are irritating or overwhelming including citrus (like lemon or orange), vinegar, rubbing alcohol, ammonia, chili or hot pepper oil, and strong menthol.

Where am I going with all of this? Actually nowhere. I just found it interesting.

Perhaps there is a lesson here for all of us, however.

If you plan to run from the police, be sure you first douse yourself and your clothing in Vicks VapoRub.