Do dogs feel their owner?
Do dogs feel their owner?
Many people swear that their dogs can sense things before they happen, or sense environmental changes that humans can’t predict!
What feels like intuition to us is mostly due to a dog’s exceptional ability to sense smell, but dogs can also read our faces and body language which helps them detect changes in mood?
Here are five surprising things your dog can sense, from incoming storms to serious illnesses.
Dogs can sense your mood
Dogs can amazingly read
their owners’ body language
Dogs can use visual cues to tell if we are happy or depressed.
They are experts in body language. Dogs confirm that dogs sense their owner,
as they can tell the size of your pupils, your posture, and your smile.
Dogs evolved to read our emotions because they depend on close emotional relationships with humans for survival.
Dogs also want to know if we are upset or if we are in a good mood.
If we are in a good mood,
Dogs will often interact with us, looking for food or attention
. But if we appear angry or aggressive, this is a warning sign to stay away.
Dogs may also sense our elevated stress levels by smelling our sweat.
However, he believes that they mainly read our mood by observing our body language and facial expressions.
Dogs can feel pregnant
Dogs may be able to sense that a woman is pregnant or at least that something major has changed in her body by smelling any change in her hormone levels.
Apart from smell, dogs may also sense changes in a woman’s lifestyle
A pregnant woman and her family adjust their daily schedule or rearrange their homes.
This will definitely trigger a reaction in dogs, as they tend to stick to a regular routine.
Dogs can predict the health problems of their owners
Some dogs can be trained to detect bouts of illness and thus alert humans to their oncoming.
In the case of hypoglycemic episodes caused by low blood glucose levels in people with type 1 diabetes, dogs may be able to smell different chemicals that are emitted by humans during a hypoglycemic episode.
In a 2015 study published in the journal Diabetes Therapy, dogs were able to identify hypoglycemia by sniffing human skin and breath samples.
Epileptic seizures are a big mystery, as there is no known smell associated with this type of seizure. However, the dogs that detect these seizures are responding to higher levels of stress and subtle behavioral changes that can precede a seizure.
What her dog does is pick up on signs of stress so if you go out and breathe fresh air, then you will release stress and not have any seizures, so the dog does not detect any particular
smell associated with epilepsy, but in fact it detects stress through body language
Dogs can feel storms
You will notice that your dog predicts storms before they happen
How many times have you noticed a dog whining, running, and generally freaking out,
An hour later , you hear a thunderstorm. The ability of dogs to predict upcoming storms is a well-documented phenomenon. Scientists have a few different theories
about dogs’ ability to predict weather forecasts.
Dogs can perceive decreases in barometric pressure, and may also detect rising levels of humidity and changes in ozone concentration.
Scientists also believe that dogs can sense changes in static electricity levels in the atmosphere before a thunderstorm strikes.
In one study, scientists divided dogs into two groups, and equipped the first group with anti-static jackets, while making the other group without any jackets.
Although only 28 dogs participated in the study and it wasn’t definitive,
70% of the dogs in the group that wore the jackets showed a decrease in panic behavior before thunderstorms, compared to only 30% of the dogs in the placebo group.
Dogs may be able to smell cancer
Some dogs were used to screen for cancer in a recent study
Dogs have an incredible sense of smell, and some are even able to alert medical workers and researchers to different forms of cancer.
In a 2013 study in the journal BMC Cancer, dogs were able to identify patients with ovarian cancer by sniffing out chemical compounds in their blood.
Dogs can also be trained to diagnose lung and breast cancer by smelling a patient’s breath.
According to a 2006 study, ordinary domestic dogs trained in only basic behaviors were trained to accurately distinguish breath samples from patients with lung and breast cancer.
It has also been shown that dogs can detect skin cancer and bladder cancer.
However, while the research surrounding dogs and their detection of cancer is promising, dogs cannot detect cancer with 100% accuracy, so we can’t replace medical tests with dogs yet.
