Sniffing is serious business.

Do you feel like your dog is an anchor when you take them on a walk? Just think how you would feel if someone put a collar around your neck and dragged you outside. Sometimes we really want to go out and sometimes a nice warm bed seems much nicer.

Once we are outside we do enjoy sniffing stuff. And occasionally we feel the urge to taste and/or eat stuff. Some of this stuff may not be appealing to you but that’s because you’re uninformed of the quality, texture, taste and most importantly smell of the stuff.

“The percentage of the dog’s brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is actually 40 times larger than that of a human! It’s been estimated that dogs can identify smells somewhere between 1,000 to 10,000 times better than nasally challenged humans can.” Read more at Understanding a Dog’s Sense of Smell from Dummies.com.

In addition, “…a dog has a phenomenal olfactory memory. A dog can remember smells long after being exposed to the original odor. Not only can your dog recognize that a certain neighborhood cat passed by the day before, he can even tell what that cat had for dinner!” Read more at Dog Sense of Smell from Dog.com.

Thus, when you take us dogs for a walk you may be thinking a bathroom walk or an exercise walk. But we’re thinking this is serious business. We must sniff and catalog everything we pass. And then store it in our brains for later retrieval. Think of your dog as a living computer. Treat your iDog with respect and don’t pull us when we’re working.