Dog Trainer Reveals The Unique Way That Your Pup Can Actually Tell Time
Turns out dogs have a keen "scents" of time.
Davizro Photography / Shutterstock.com If you've ever had a dog, you know that they have a keen sense of time. A few minutes late getting up in the morning to let them out? Oh, they'll know. Time for dinner but you haven't yet gotten up from the couch to tend to the kibble? They've got your number.
But how? It's not like they have little doggy Apple Watches or something! A dog trainer on TikTok actually has the fascinating answer.
The dog trainer revealed how your dog can actually tell time with great precision.
We all know that dogs' noses and sense of smell are far more advanced than humans. But it turns out they have far more powers in those little snoots than most of us ever realized.
Dog trainer Victoria Stilwell is something of an expert on the subject, and she explained that one of the amazing abilities of dogs' noses, technically called "leathers," is to use them as a sort of clock to gauge the time of day.
Stilwell said dogs' noses provide them with constant information that helps them interpret the world — including the time.
First, some basics. "The dark part of your dog's nose is called a leather, and every one is unique," she said in a recent video, likening them to human fingerprints. "No two noses are the same."
"The end of your dog's nose is always cold and wet because that moisture traps scent molecules," which she explained are then taken up by tiny hairs called cilia, similar to how human noses work.
But they also have a special organ humans don't. Called Jacobson's Organ, or a vomeronasal plate, it's located in the roof of dogs' mouths and it detects pheromones and other chemical messages — this is why they sniff each other's backsides when they meet, for example.
Dogs are also much better at breathing than we are.
"If you look at your dog's nostrils," Stilwell explained, "you'll see that they're kind of like human nostrils, but they also have slits at the side."
Called nairs, these slits allow dogs to sniff in and out seven times a second — a rate that would make humans hyperventilate. And it allows them to get as much scent as possible with each inhale.
Photo: Jolanda Aalbers / Shutterstock
They also have way more scent receptors than us — an average of 220 million to a billion, whereas our dumb noses only have six million.
"It is said that if you took a drop of human sweat and you put it into, like, a cubic meter of air, a person would smell it, and so would a dog," Stilwell explained.
"But you take that drop of human sweat and you put it in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, your dog will be able to smell it." This keen sense of smell allows dogs to process all kinds of information. And it turns out it also helps them tell time.
Stilwell explained that dogs can basically smell what time it is throughout the day because of subtleties in the air.
"When a dog smells something in the air, they're smelling the future," Stilwell said, whereas smelling the ground is more about processing the past. "They're smelling what was there."
Dogs use this to sniff out clues in the air in our homes.
"Air moves very differently in your house throughout the day," Stilwell explained. "During the day, air rises up the walls to the ceiling, and at night it comes back down to the ground," due to the way warm air rises and cooler air falls.
Photo: Lazy_Bear / Shutterstock
To a dog's keen sense of smell, this air smells very different. They can literally sniff out the subtleties in the air circulating through the room, which makes them "able to tell the time of day just by where the air is placed in the house," Stilwell explained.
So you can try to fool them that it's not time for dinner all you want, but trust and believe — your dog nose! — er, knows, that is — because your dog can actually tell time. Who knew?
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.