Talk:Dog sense of smell

Conflicting information

The first paragraph of the article says, "This is thought to make its sense of smell up to 40 times more sensitive than human's.", then further down the page - "The typical dog's nose is 100,000 to 1 million times as sensitive as a human's, and the most sensitive breed, the bloodhound, has a sense of smell which is can be up to 100 million times as sensitive" Disprove (talk) 20:43, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

@Disprove: Thanks for noticing this. I suspect the larger number is correct. Here's what the 40 times source says:

The average person has around 5 million scent receptors in his or her nose, which puts us in the lower third of mammals in our smell sensitivity. The average dog has around 220 million receptors in its nose, which potentially makes its sense of smell forty-four times more sensitive than ours.

Note that the number given (44) is merely the number of dog receptors divided by the number of human receptors; it is therefore likely that this is not the real difference in sensitivity if the number of receptors is not directly proportional to sensitivity.

The source giving the larger number is also published by an academic press (University of Chicago) instead of a popular one (Simon and Schuster). XabqEfdg (talk) 04:20, 28 July 2024 (UTC)