Are scent work classes the new form of enrichment for your dog

There’s no doubt that dogs have amazing noses. For example, dogs have 300 million scent receptors compared to our measly 5 million (Else, 2020) and possess the ability to detect odours at concentrations of up to 500 parts-per-trillion (Johnson, 1999)—the equivalent of one teaspoon of sugar in two Olympic sized swimming pools of water.

We use dogs’ noses as biosensors for the detection of all sorts of things: explosives, bodies, drugs, cancers (Beebe, Howell and Bennett, 2016) and cryptic wildlife and/or their faeces (Karp, 2020). But the more we learn to understand our dog’s needs, the more scent work is being used not just for our benefit but also as a form of enrichment to benefit our pets.