Why your dog’s always there to welcome you home: He smells how long you’ve been away from him
- It is believed that dogs have the ability to ‘smell the time’
- They realize that their owners reappear after their scent reaches a certain level
- Devoted pets then sit by the door waiting for their owners to come home
Dog owners have long been baffled by their pets’ ability to greet them at the door when they come home from work.
And a family member already inside might notice a little dog rushing to the door a good fifteen minutes before the person they’re waiting for arrives.
But as impressive as this trick is, dogs are not psychic, an expert has debunked – they can simply ‘smell time’ as it passes.
The theory, discussed in a recent lecture, is that dogs have learned how much their owners’ scent fades during the day after they leave the house for work.
When the odor diminishes to a certain level – say, after about nine hours have passed – their devoted pet realizes that this is the time when they normally show up at the door.
The theory is that dogs have learned how quickly their owners’ scent fades the day after they leave the house for work.
Professor Alexandra Horowitz, a highly respected expert on dog cognition from Barnard College in the US, discussed the phenomenon during a lecture called For The Love Of Dogs at the Toronto Public Library.
She told the audience: ‘It may be that over the course of the day, when we are away, the smell of our home actually diminishes.
‘The odors become less strong, so when you make coffee in the morning you can smell the coffee and after a while this coffee smell is gone. So it may be that dogs know when you’re coming home because your scent has reached that weakness that it usually does when you come home.’
When an owner’s scent drops to a certain level, his devoted pet realizes that this is the time when he normally shows up at the door
The theory was tested almost a decade ago in a BBC series called Inside the Animal Mind.
A dog named Jazz seemed to know when his owner Johnny came home and would jump on the couch every day around 4:40 p.m. as if waiting for him – despite not coming through the door for another twenty minutes.
The programme, presented by Chris Packham, revealed the dog stopped doing this after his owner’s sweaty T-shirt was floated across the living room by his partner in the middle of the day.
Johnny’s scent reappeared, which seemed to deter his dog from determining his arrival time.
Professor Horowitz has said that dogs’ ability to link scent and time also helps them track the direction someone has gone from the trail they left behind.
This is because their most recent footprint smells stronger than the one seconds earlier.