Humans have been using a dog’s keen sense of smell to our advantage for thousands of years — whether it be hunting prey for dinner or having them sniff out drugs at the airport. But for as sharp as their noses can be, a team of researchers from the University of Waikato and Adelaide University found that if you really want a dog to be on top of their sniffing game, it’s best not to have them sniff if they’ve skipped breakfast.
According to research published in the journal Learning and Motivation, hungry detection dogs are more likely to falsely identify the wrong smell, even though they’re still about as good at finding the correct smell. Not having breakfast throws them off their game a little bit.
Researchers tested six dogs trained to identify a combination of four odors. The researchers had the dogs show off their scent-detection skills before and after breakfast. Whether or not they had eaten, their accuracy in finding the target hovered around 90 percent. Trouble arose only when the target smell wasn’t there.
Scientists Found a Surprising Reason Detection Dogs Might Get It Wrong
Hungry dogs were significantly more likely to incorrectly label the missing smell. Their stomachs were so empty that every suspicious odor started smelling like the one they were trained to look for.
In a statement released on the Adelaide University website, Associate Professor Tim Edwards of the University of Waikato compared it to desperately searching for your keys and suddenly deciding every shiny piece of metal is probably them. Dogs that professionally sniff become less selective about what their noses are telling their brain when they’ve got empty stomachs.
That means that if you have a dog whose sense of smell you rely on for whatever reason, simply feeding it it’s breakfast isn’t just keeping the dog alive and is the bare minimum you should be doing to take care of your pup, but serving breakfast is kind of like getting a daily chance to recalibrate its sense of smell.
There’s a lot more to it than that, of course. Training dogs to respond to specific odors is a meticulous process that requires consistent training and a reward system that can change the outcome. Making sure a dog starts their day with a solid meal is only one small pillar of a larger system, but it’s an important one if you rely on the accuracy of your dog’s nose.
After all, wouldn’t you be at least a little bit bad at your job if you were starving?
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