Understanding dog behavior will never not be totally interesting. From having their own love languages to specific barks having unique meanings, dogs are truly complex and amazing creatures with their own rich inner worlds.
As it turns out, the bond between dog and owner goes even deeper than you might have ever imagined, so much so that a dog can even detect when their person is stressed out.
In an interview with American Kennel Club (AKC), Dr. Zoe Parr-Cortes, veterinarian and PhD graduate from the University of Bristol, explained how dogs can pick up on their owner’s mental state through various cues.
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“As one of our closest companions, dogs have co-evolved alongside humans for thousands of years. Because of this, both humans and dogs have learned to recognize cues in each other that signal how the other is feeling. Several studies have demonstrated that dogs respond to the sights and sounds of various human emotions, including crying, vocal tones, and facial expressions,” Dr. Parr-Cortes explained to AKC.
In addition, dogs also can sense stress through scent. According to research published in PLOS One, dogs can actually detect stress from sweat and breath samples through their sense of smell.
In this study, baseline sweat and breath samples were taken from human participants. After that, the researchers administered math tests with the goal of causing the participants stress (side note: that would absolutely work to make me panic) and then collected a second round of samples.
When the researchers presented the dogs with the samples, the canine participants could distinguish the baseline from the stress samples with over 90% accuracy thanks to a shift in the breath and sweat samples’ volatile organic compounds, which is detectable to dogs’ noses.
More recent research conducted by Dr. Parr-Cortes and other members of the Animal Welfare and Behaviour Group at Bristol Vet School sought to understand exactly what it is the dogs are smelling that allow them to detect stress in those samples.
While it was unclear whether the dogs in this particular study were responding to the humans’ cortisol, adrenaline or other stress markers, this study opened up more avenues to further test what the dogs are sensing that makes them detect stress. Either way, pretty interesting stuff!