SnowBrains
Dogs have a much better sense of smell than humans, as in 10,000 to 100,000 times more acute than our own weak noses. For instance, they can smell a teaspoon of sugar in water as large as two Olympic sized pools. In their noses, dogs have around 300 million olfactory receptors compared to our six million. Plus, the smell-analyzing part of their brain is about 40 times larger than ours. So since they are so much better at smelling than us, humans have come up with a bunch of creative ways to put their noses (and other skills) to use. Experience the best of these dogs with jobs.
At the Amboseli National Park in Kenya, the Big Life Foundation employs dogs to help catch poachers (illegal hunters). The Park is home to over 900 elephants, plus giraffes, lions, zebras, and other animals. Poachers hunt elephants to sell their ivory and the animals are vulnerable to extinction because of it.
Big Life Foundation
However, dogs have proved they’re great at finding poachers. When an animal is illegally killed, the dogs come in and track the criminal all the way back to his front door. The dogs are so good at their job that their presence discourages would-be poachers from hunting in the park, because they know they’ll get caught. The dog team is sometimes called in to solve cases elsewhere, too.
On Middle Island in Australia, a colony of little blue penguins were living their best lives until a bunch of foxes came along. The little penguins (yes, that’s actually their name) are only about a foot tall, making them the smallest of all penguin species. There were about 800 of them on the island, but the foxes were relentless until one year there was only a handful left.
The Times
A chicken farmer, Swampy Marsh (and yes, that’s actually his name), decided one of his Maremma chicken-guarding dogs could protect the penguins. So, he sent Oddball on over. Not a single little penguin was caught by a fox after that and the population grew to about 200. Various dogs have guarded the penguins over the years, and there was even a movie made about them!
The Italian Coast Guard employs several Newfoundland dogs, who are big, fluffy lifeguards. They’re great at the job because their calm, loving temperament keeps them from panicking easily, which is really quite important in such a high-stress situation. Plus, they love water.
Italian School of Water Rescue Dogs
The dogs save around 3,000 lives a year because they’re fast and strong enough to carry a person, but they don’t just start off saving lives and jumping out of helicopters. Each dog trains for three years on the shore and in helicopters and boats. Then, once they’re on the job, they patrol the water for anyone in danger.
United Utilities, a water company in England, hired two new members to the team this year: Snipe the cocker spaniel and Denzel the springer spaniel. Their job is to sniff out leaky pipes, which are often underground and hard to find, but quite wasteful.
United Utilities
The two dogs work by sniffing for the faint trace of chlorine, which is used in very small quantities to disinfect water. First, the company uses satellite images to find a general search area, then they send in the dogs to pinpoint the leak. Denzel is highly motivated to find chlorine, because that’s how he gets his toy.
The St. Francis Monastery in Cochabamba, Bolivia adopted a cute little stray dog and named him Friar Bigotón (aka Friar Mustache in Spanish). St. Francis is actually the patron of animals, so it makes perfect sense that they would adopt their own little dog to help with any monkly duties.
Kasper Mariusz Kapron
The monks say Friar Mustache preaches to the fish and takes his job as a monk very seriously. But when he’s not doing hard work, he has tons of fun playing and running, too. He has a happy home with people who love him, which is all any dog needs.
The game developers Remedy Entertainment employed a dog earlier this year, Uuno the Staffordshire Bull Terrier whose owner is their Junior Cinematographer. They outfitted him with motion capture equipment, to experiment with different kinds of motion tests and see if they could get any useful data.
Remedy Entertainment
Since Uuno is playful and a fast learner, they recorded him walking and doing tricks, like rolling over. But while Remedy hasn’t planned a video game for him yet, they might in the future. But first, they would need to make an actual motion capture suit for him that he’s comfortable in, to get natural movement data. Other video game developers are doing the same, like those making “The Last of Us Part II”.
Every year, the Vancouver Police Department makes a delightful police dog calendar to raise money for charity. For 2019, the charities are the B.C. Cancer Foundation and the B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation. In the photos, the dogs are very serious on the job. Like this dog and his partner are doing the typical good boy, bad cop routine.
Vancouver Police Department
Luckily, this job lets the dogs put their many skills to use: catching bad guys and looking great doing it. In one picture, a German shepherd sports a pair of aviator sunglasses and sticks his head out the window of a police car. But he’s too cool to have his tongue lolling out.
The American foulbrood disease threatens honeybees across the world, as it’s a deadly disease that can infect a whole bee colony. It can spread from one hive to another when beekeepers use the same equipment between hives. But luckily, beekeeper Josh Kennet in Australia came up with a sweet solution to the problem.
Huffington Post
He trained his dog, Bazz the black Labrador, to sniff out the bee disease. But to keep him from getting stung, Kennet made him a custom beekeeper suit. Together, the beekeeper duo can find infected hives and quarantine them to keep the disease from spreading any further.
The U.S. Navy SEALs employ quite a lot of dogs, many of which are Belgian Malinois. They’re similar to German shepherds, but smaller and lighter, which is great for parachuting. Yes, you read that right, these dogs jump out of airplanes with the Navy SEALs. They’re usually strapped to their handler, which is why the lower weight comes in handy.
Navy Seals
Navy SEAL dogs are trained to detect explosives and find hiding hostile humans. They’re also faster than people, so they can chase down anyone who’s trying to run away. Some of them are outfitted with some pretty intense gear, like Cairo who wore “doggles” (dog goggles) that gave him night and infrared vision. How much of the infrared imaging he understood, we’ll probably never know.
The Vail Avalanche Rescue dogs are trained at Vail Mountain, Colorado to find people buried under snow or trapped in a storm. To the dogs, it’s a game. They’ve been trained to find toys and things under the snow, with increasing difficulty. They’ve ridden chairlifts and jumped out of helicopters. Their noses are just that useful in search and rescue missions.
Scott Brockmeier
A trained avalanche dog can search two and a half acres in a quarter of the time it takes 20 people to search the same area. They sniff out human scent and stick their head in the snow when they find it, following the strength of the smell. One dog in Switzerland even found someone buried 40 feet deep.
For decades, dogs have been helping save New Zealand’s many native bird species, like the kiwi. The birds are in danger because of invasive predators, like rats and stoats, so dogs are trained to find either the pest predators or the protected species to help conservation efforts.
Gingerdogwithajob/Instagram
New Zealand cleared about 100 islands of predators, but mammals can still invade via boats and other vehicles, so dogs search them for the pests. Other dogs find threatened species, so people can tag them, monitor them, or move them to an island sanctuary. To protect the threatened birds, the dogs wear muzzles. After all, many of these dogs were bred to hunt birds, not protect them.
Blackie and Boyce the Dobermans and Saxon and Elsa the Northern Inuits played the “Corellian hounds” in Solo: A Star Wars Story. They wore full body costumes, with just their paws exposed, that made them look like horrifying alien creatures. The costumes took six months to design and make because they needed to be comfortable and allow movement.
Reddit/StarWars.com
In the movie, the dogs race after Han Solo, the title character, much like a couple of police dogs after a suspect. Saxon and Elsa also played Dire Wolves in “Game of Thrones,” so this wasn’t their first acting gig. Saxon played Arya Stark’s wolf Nymeria, but clearly, his acting career was only just starting.
Sure, most people have heard of seeing eye dogs, but they’re usually for humans, not other dogs. Well, when Ginger’s family decided to adopt a new dog, they didn’t know what they were getting into. They brought Ginger to the shelter to meet the other dogs and give her approval. The only one she liked was Kimchi, a blind Cavalier King Charles spaniel, so her family adopted him.
GingerAndKimchi/Facebook
Now, whenever the two dogs go out, Ginger the golden retriever guides her friend Kimchi. He gets nervous around unfamiliar stairs, so Ginger helps him down them. The two also provide emotional support to people at hospitals, schools, and companies.
The six-year-old German shepherd has made a name for herself in Colombia, where she works with the Colombian National Police at airports to find illegal narcotics. She’s gotten more than 200 people arrested and found about nine tons of illicit materials.
Fernando Vergara/NBC News
But Sombra’s drawn negative attention as well as positive: criminals have put out a bounty on her head, somewhere between $7,000 and $70,000. Sombra, which means “Shadow” in English, must have messed with their profits enough to be a real nuisance. The police are increasing security around her in response to the threat and she’s been moved to a different airport.
While pigs were once the favorite for finding truffles (valuable fungi that grow underground, similar to mushrooms) dogs are now much more widely used. Truffles can sell for $1200 a pound, although most are smaller than that. So dogs use their spectacular noses to sniff out these tasty human treats.
Food Valley Travel
Compared to pigs, dogs are easier to train, they have more stamina, and they’re less likely to eat the very valuable truffle when they find it. This is truly a benefit, since truffle hunters sometimes had to wrestle the fungi out of their pig’s mouth. So think about all that pig slobber the next time you’re about to order truffle off a menu, and be thankful a dog probably found it.
Your local library may have a dog or two hanging around, but they’re not there to check out Air Bud on DVD. The dogs are actually volunteering for children who have trouble reading and need extra practice, because they are very patient listeners. Dogs are great for this because they don’t judge the kids, like their peers might.
The Quad-City Times
For the kids, it builds their self-esteem. The dogs, meanwhile, get a few pats and a good story. Plus, reading to dogs makes kids more excited about reading, which is great for them and their performance in school. The dogs are often certified therapy dogs that volunteer with their owners.
People have put dogs’ great noses to use by employing them to find dangerous or illegal substances like explosive or narcotics, as Sombra does in Bolivia. But dogs are not hired based on whether or not they can write up a thorough report of what they did, because it would probably just look like this one.
Reddit
Many of these dogs work at airports, making sure we can all fly safely, and some are even reducing security wait times. To find explosives, they sniff out chemical vapors. Trained dogs learn a variety of different suspicious odors that might be used for nefarious reasons, so they can find the widest range of dangerous materials. To them it’s fun, to us it’s a life saver.
Uggie was a Jack Russell terrier who starred in “The Artist” and “Water for Elephants.” He was rescued and raised as an actor by animal trainer Omar von Muller. Uggie started in commercials but moved on up when he landed the role “The Dog” in “The Artist,” in which he played the main character’s sidekick.
Mario Anzuon/Reuters
“The Artist” won five Academy Awards in 2012 and Uggie won the Palm Dog award at the Cannes Film Festival for the movie. He was the first dog to leave his paw prints in cement on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where many other stars have left their own imprints.
While most dogs are hired for their noses, Jax was hired for another thing dogs are great at: licking. On the Island of Skye in Scotland, postmaster Ray Chandler brought his dog Jax into work to do a job he’s quite qualified for. Jax is the Official Stamp Licker for the village of Portree.
riitasointu/Instagram
Anyone who doesn’t want to lick their own stamps can just ask him to do it, but sometimes Jax is so enthusiastic that he accidentally eats the stamp instead of just licking it. So, take the help at your own risk, because they aren’t selling stamp insurance.
A new group of dogs, the K-9 Artifact Finders, are being trained to find historically and culturally significant antiquities. Artifacts are sometimes stolen from museums or looted from archaeological sites and then smuggled globally. Well, Red Arch Cultural Heritage Law & Policy Research aims to protect artifacts and is testing out a new method: dogs.
Penn Vet Working Dog Center
Right now, they’re searching for scents associated with illegally owned artifacts and training the dogs to find pottery. The program is in the early stages, but they’re hoping the dogs will work at airports to find smuggled artifacts from places like Iraq and Syria, where terrorist organizations make money from the trafficking.
While I doubt we’ll have dogs running the local laundromat any time soon (or ever) they can be quite helpful in certain households. People with service dogs can be disabled in a variety of different ways and they may be unable to do their own laundry. Well, to help them out, the company JTM Service made the first dog-operated washing machine.
JTMServiceLtd/Youtube
It’s called the “Woof to Wash” and it starts washing after hearing a dog’s bark. The dog opens it by pulling on a rope knot or pushing a paw-operated button. Then, the dog uses its mouth to load the machine. But once the dog takes out the clean laundry, it probably just has to put it all back in to wash off the dog slobber.
Pella is a trained therapy dog who’s been in many courtrooms. She often works with children, helping to ease their anxiety so they can testify in criminal cases. It can be extremely uncomfortable and stressful to talk about traumatizing events in front of a whole audience, so the dogs can make it easier.
CBS News
There are about 155 courthouse dogs in the U.S. now, who sit in the witness box or do their comforting in the hallway. Some judges and defense lawyers worry that dogs in the witness box will sway the jury, making them more likely to believe the witness, but that hasn’t been proven.
Plenty of dogs are used in natural disasters, to search for people. Amelia “Mia” Earheart took a trip to Northern California recently, to help in the search for lost people at the wildfire site in Paradise, California. She’s trained to find cadavers, so with hundreds of people missing her skills were highly needed. Mia was one of several cadaver dogs sent to the site.
Lauren Detreville
There were a lot of scents for the dogs to work through, so the searching was hard. Many of the dogs and their handlers were volunteers, coming from several hours away to help the efforts. The dogs found 67 people in the fire’s aftermath and the list of missing people dropped from over a thousand to less than 30.
Duke the fluffy white Great Pyrenees won the mayoral election three times in a row of a town that has just over a thousand people. In the latest election, every vote was for him, except one for his girlfriend Lassie. Duke lives both in town and on a farm, so he appeals to everyone.
The Independent
Duke is on a few highway billboards promoting their town and he regularly hangs out at the local pub. Other towns in the U.S. have elected dogs as mayors, including Sunol, California, Eastsound, Washington, and Rabbit Hash, Kentucky. As for why the people of Rabbit Hash didn’t elect a rabbit as mayor, we may never know.
It’s not every day you meet a dog more educated than most people, but some dogs have been through extensive schooling. Kirsch the Golden Retriever accompanied his owner Carlos Mora to every class during Mora’s time at Johns Hopkins University. Mora got a Masters of Science in Counseling and Kirsch got an honorary degree as well.
Boise State University
Kirsch even got to wear his own cap and gown, as any graduate would. Other service dogs have graduated with their people before, from colleges and high schools. Kirsch was lucky that his full-time job required him to go to school, because he didn’t even have to pay for his degree!
Some sports are taking advantage of what dogs love to do. At a Venus Williams tennis match, dogs put one of their most finely honed skills to use: ball fetching. After a player scored a point, one of the very good boys ran out onto the court and grabbed the ball, taking it back to the sidelines.
ASB YouTube/People
At some baseball games, dogs are employed to grab bats after the batter has run to first base. Bats look quite a lot like sticks, so it’s just another fun game of fetch for the dog. Jake the Golden Retriever even delivers water to some of the players.
While a service dog is often hired to lead a blind person around or alert a deaf person when necessary, they can do more than that. For people with any kind of disability, they can provide help by bringing their owner medication, mail, or even a drink from the fridge.
The Globe and Mail
If a wheelchair is rolling away, the dog can grab it and bring it back. They can even pull someone in a wheelchair who might have weak arms, as long as the dog is big enough. Plus, dogs can press the elevator button as long as you’re fine with possibly stopping on a few more floors. Service dogs are like little furry assistants that you pay with love and snuggles.
Colt’s owner trained military dogs for years, but after she experienced a traumatic brain injury, she trained her own service dog. Whenever she has a seizure, Colt puts his body between her head and the floor to protect her from injury. She says he can also warn her of an oncoming seizure. Although this dog skill hasn’t exactly been proven by science, it may well be an inherent instinct present in some dogs.
Shareably
Some people say their dogs anticipate their seizures, but it seems this might be something that can’t be trained. It’s possible that a dog is either born with the ability or not. But in some cases, these seizure-anticipating dogs haven’t been proven reliable. It hasn’t been studied all that much, so hopefully, we’ll have a better answer in the future as to whether or not dogs can actually predict seizures.
Some people with diabetes (especially kids) have service dogs to alert them when their blood sugar is low, which can be life-saving in the middle of the night, but how do they do it? Well, one study found that type one diabetics have more isoprene (an organic compound) in their breath when their blood sugar drops, so it’s possible that the dogs are smelling that.
Evan Los
However, compared to other methods of detecting blood sugar, like a continuous glucose monitor device, dogs can be slower to alert. Plus, dogs can give plenty of false alarms, because they might be sensing other changes in blood sugar. But when it comes to having a chronic disease, a dog is also great emotional support.
People have told stories about how their dogs have sniffed out their cancer before any human knew it was there, but there are no jobs for these dogs. Yet. A small study found that dogs can identify cancer with about 90% accuracy, which is better than some lab tests can do. Right now, scientists are putting on a larger scale experiment to see how well dogs can really smell cancer.
Caribbean360
They’ve seen that dogs can distinguish between cancer patient urine and cancer free urine. How do they do this? It’s not entirely clear, but scientists think cancer might give off volatile organic compounds that dogs can smell. If they’re really that good at it, maybe dogs will become a more integral part of the cancer field some day.