Animal senses;Many animals use their sense of smell to communicate with each other. For example, horses will greet each other ‘nose to nose’ taking in each other’s odours. Baby animals will locate their mother using their scent. Many domesticated animals will greet humans based on their scent; often dogs will sniff a visitor to ‘check them out’. Animals including our domesticated dogs, cats and horses are blessed with an amazingly strong and powerful sense of smell, often millions of times more efficient than that of the human sense of smell. It is very difficult to measure but approximate figures that we have include the following; Cats have around 45 million olfactory cells, German Shepherd Dogs have 250 million olfactory cells, Labradors have 280 million and Beagles have over 300 million! (compared to man who has about 5 million) Birds were thought at one time to have little or no sense of smell. However, research has shown that their brains do have olfactory bulbs, and the sea birds such as albatross have large percentage of their brain given over to the olfactory bulb, showing how useful a sense of smell is to them in hunting. Smaller garden birds have smaller areas of their brain given over to the sense of smell, but none the less show an ability to recognise and use aromatic plants to line their nests (these help repel insects and keep the nest clean of bacteria to help their chicks the thrive).
Posted on: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 08:01:55 +0000
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