Do Dogs Smell Pizza?

Everyone knows that dogs have a superior sense of smell, but what most people don’t understand is that dogs perceive odors differently than humans do.

If you think the smell of pizza is amazing, just ask your dog. His sense of smell is at least 40 times greater than yours. It’s astounding how dogs are able to smell things as much as 12 miles away if the wind blows right! While humans no longer need dogs to help them detect nearby wild predators, dogs can still help to be on the lookout for pizza delivery.

That’s what this article is about. I am writing to help trainers who are just getting started in new dog sports that the AKC, CKC, UKC, and Nosework organizations have introduced. Depending on the organization, it is commonly referred to as Scent Work, nose work, or Scent Detection.

In these sports (and they are all slightly different), dogs are trained to locate and indicate several non-narcotic scents (i.e. Birch, Anise, Clove, etc). Dogs are timed on how long it takes to find the hidden odors. There are different levels of difficulty.

Before I proceed, I need to clarify that I began my career in the early 1990s with a search and rescue organization, where we conducted a lot of nosework.

In that case, I will use the pizza analogy, which is when humans enter a pizza restaurant and smell the aroma of pizza. When dogs enter a pizza restaurant, they don’t smell pizza; they smell flour, salt, pepper, tomatoes, cheese, and other ingredients.

The reason we know this to be valid is that during our nosework training, we found that we could hide cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, heroin, etc., in the exact location from day one of the dog’s foundation training. Then, once the dog reached a level of fluency in the work, we could hide just one of those narcotics by itself, and the dogs would always indicate on the single narcotic. Knowing this made life a little easier for drug dog handlers who had gone to great lengths to keep their training aides separate.

This same concept applies to the scent work sport. We sell scent work training kits for people who train in various organizations. 

If sport dog trainers follow the pizza protocol in their foundation training, all they need to do is occasionally test their training by hiding one odor by itself. If their training has been correct, their dog will indicate. Then they can sleep better at night. If the dog doesn’t indicate, the dog is not ready for a competition. They need to go back and continue to work on their foundation training.